Film Comment - January/February 1977

Brendan Gill on THE LAST TYCOON
De Laurentiis: 'King KongJs Nice Guy'
Robin Wood,on SM^II-Town Film Noir
Did Anti-Hy|ie]^fe^eJ^CKY ^Hit? ^

Robert

JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Is Film Criticism
Too Violent? *
by Roger Greenspuft

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FILM

COMIVIBIMT published by THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER

VOLUME 13 NUMBER 1

JANUARY-f EBJtUARY 197,7

STAFF

editor

RICHARD CORLISS

associate editor
BROOKS RILEY

business manager
SAYRE MAXFIELD

graphic design
GEORGE SILLAS

contributing writers
RAYMOND DURGNAT
ROGER GREENSPUN
RICHARD T. JAMESON
CHARLES MICHENER
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
RICHARD ROUD
ANDREW SARRIS
RICHARD THOMPSON
AMOS VOGEL
ROBIN WOOD

contributing editor
STUART BYRON

advertising manager
TONYIMPAVIDO

research consultant
MARY CORLISS

The opinions expressed in FILM COMMENT
are those of the individual authors and do not
necessarily represent Film Society
of Lincoln Center policy or the opinions
of the editor or staff of the magazine.

FILM COMMENT, Januarv-February 1977, volume 13, number 1,
published bimonthly by the Film Society of Lincoln Center,
1865 Broadway, N.Y. 10023 USA.

Second class postage paid at New York, New York and additional mailing
offices. Copyright © 1977 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center. All rights
reserved. This publication is fully protected by domestic and international
copyright. It is forbidden to duplicate any part of this publication in any
way without prior written permission from the publishers.

Editorial correspondence:
FILM COMMENT, 1865 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10023 USA. Please
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on the cover:
Sissy Spacek in CARRIE
(photo: United Artists).

Benton, p.6

Rudolph, p.10

De Laurentiis, p.18

CONTENTS

Journal

Bangkok/Gera id Weales
page 2

R. Altman & Co.

by Robert Levine
page 4

Robert Benton and THE LATE SHQW
page 6

Alan Rudolph and WfLCOME TO LA.
page 10 *. . • -

Violence and Filnf'Criticism

On CARRIE and THE TEXAS GHAIN SAW MASSACRE
by Roger Greenspun
page 14

• #9 ^ t-

Dino De Laurentn|ff '

interviewed by Stuart Byron
page 18

The End of Tax Shelters

by Mitch Tuchman
page 22

Samuel Fuller

interviewed by Richard Thompson
page 25

Midsection

In the Realm of the Censors, by James Bouras
page 32

Birds of American Film, by Michael Pressler
page 34

independents: Amos Vogel on a Catalogue of Omissions
page 35

The Industry: Stuart Byron on ROCKY and His Friends
page 36

Television: Richard Koszarski on Disco-Vision
page 38

The Last Tycoon

Elia Kazan

interviewed by Charles Silver and Mary Corliss
page 40

West Egg in Bel Air
a review by Brendan Gill
page 44

on this page:

Art Carney in THE LATE SHOW (photo: Lion's Gate Films);
John Considine in WELCOME TO L.A. (photo: Lion's Gate);
Jessica Lange in KING KONG (photo: Paramount Pictures);
Robert DeNiro in THE LAST TYCOON (photo: Paramount).

Kazan, p.40

Ideology, Genre, Auteur

On IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and SHADOW OF A DOUBT
by Robin Wood
page 46

Barbet Schroeder

interviewed by Elliott Stein
page 52

Books -

Thorold Dickinson on The British Documentary
page 58

Back Page

page 64

Gerald Weales
from BANGKOK

G reat, garish movie posters rise
above the streets in Bangkok,
luring me in a language, even in a
script that I do not know. Given to
greens and reds, infected by yellow, the
very colors suggest corruption to fit the
promise of sex and violence in the re¬
peated figures—couples rolling on un¬
comfortable looking local flora and de¬
fiant men brandishing guns. Sometimes
the faces, neither Oriental nor Western,
have an obliquely familiar look and, rec¬
ognizing George C. Scott or William
Holden or James Brolin, I know that the

HINDENBURG Or THE WILD BUNCH Or

gable and lombard is in town. There
are Chinese cheapies from Hong Kong,
spaghetti Westerns and aging flics noirs
from France, but it is the local product,
the real Thai pictures I yearn to see.

I began to think that my longing was in
vain. During my month in Thailand, I
was a prisoner of cordiality. My hosts,
who understand that Thai food is the
country's greatest glory, spent a great
part of my stay seeing that I had enough
to eat and, more important, that I got at
least a taste of most of the extant de¬
licacies. They arranged for me to see the
more accessible celebrated places out¬
side Bangkok—Chieng Mai, Phoket—
and took me to enough temples and
palaces for me to begin to imagine that I
could tell a Buddha of the Lopburi period
from one cast in late Ayudhya. Endlessly
kind, patient, warm, they just could not
believe that I wanted to see a Thai movie.
Thai pride, in this family at least, stop¬
ped at the door of the picture palace; the
films were terrible, I was told, and the
theaters worse.

Every protective gesture made me
more certain that I needed to see a Thai
series on television, a period tale in¬
volving a great deal of exposition which I
could not understand, a handful of lan¬
guidly suffering ladies, a syrupy child
hero with £ magic ring and a gap-toothed
villain who saved the show—
dramatically, at least. Given to an in¬
sanely screeching laugh and a tendency
to use the body wire on all occasions, he
suggested Terry-Thomas as a malevo¬
lent Peter Pan. A taste, however, is not a

2 JAN UARY-FEBRU ARY 1977

feast, and besides I wanted to see a Thai
movie with a contemporary setting.

As the end of my stay approached, re¬
prieve. My fellow American visitor,
more persuasive than I, had gained the
cooperation of our hosts; we could see
not only a Thai movie, but the one of our
choice. From the posters and the display
stills which we had studied diligently,
there appeared to be three generic
choices: a sex-and-violence adventure, a
naughty situation comedy which looked
like gidget goes to Bangkok and a
weeper. We wisely chose the last. We
were tossed into the best seats in the
house—which was incidentally a pleas¬
ant enough theater except for the holes
in the armrests where too many elbows
had pressed too urgently into the sponge
rubber—while our hosts, who would
have none of it, went shopping, a Thai
addiction more virulent than my passion
for the movies.

loose translation of the Thai title—
and only a loose translation is pos¬
sible, I am told—would be oh, my lovely
DAUGHTER Or OH, MY DAUGHTER, MY

love. Perhaps yes, my darling daugh -
ter, if Mark Reed will forgive me. Based
on the scientific scale customarily used to
measure such pictures, I would call it a
two-handkerchief movie. Shot partly in
Zurich, where everyone seems to speak
either English or Thai (the signs and the
Tagblatt are in German), partly in
Bangkok, it is the story of a couple,
drifting apart, brought back together
when the titular daughter, as unctuous a
movie moppet as I have seen in any lan¬

guage, promises—and fails to keep the
promise, of course—to die of a rare brain
disease. After a car accident in which the
father permanently injures his right leg
(the variations on the limp are a joy for
moviegoers who admire serious foolish¬
ness), he rejects his wife and takes to the
bottle. At first I assumed that there must
be another woman, but no such charac¬
ter appears. It is psychological failure
apparently, some cliche about mutilated
manhood.* It is the woman who strays.

Relax, I have no intention of recount¬
ing the whole plot. The important thing
is that with a couple of exceptions the
movie might have come directly from a
teary 1937 afternoon at the Vaudette in
Connersville, Indiana. One of the ex¬
ceptions is visual, the other in the plot.
There is a bloodily graphic fake opera¬
tion in which a great hunk of brain is
lifted from what passes for the child's
head, leaving a hole big enough to
emplant a middle-sized silver souvenir
bowl from Chieng Mai. The plot varia¬
tion is more interesting. The attractive
young man with whom the heroine
"falls" is not sent packing, as he would
have been in vintage Hollywood, but is
allowed to win the true love of the in¬
genue.

Otherwise, characters, scenes, plot—
all are familiar. There are so many child-
star bits that I will settle for one. Little

*The dialogue might have clued me in earlier, but I
understood only one line of Thai in the whole
film —“Khob Khun Krub" (Thank you). For the most
part, the movie was as easy to follow as a silent with
only a few unimportant questions still unanswered
at the end. Was the ingenue the heroine's sister, as I
assume? What were the characters' names?

Whoozis comes downstairs and finds
Daddy drunkenly asleep on the couch;
she returns a second time to cover him
lovingly with her very own comforter—a
scene even more touching than the im¬
mediately preceding one in which the
loyal servant, trying to make him com¬
fortable, turns on the electric fan. Since
the director is a fanatic about balance.
Daddy must be roused to play a similar
scene with the sleeping child. There
wasn't a dry eye in the house.

The servant mentioned above is the
child's nurse, a character turn designed
for both laughter and tears (cf. May Rob¬
son in four daughters, Hattie McDaniel
in almost anything). The ingenue, a stu¬
dent in Zurich, has a comic boyfriend,
played by an actor who seems to be try¬
ing out for the lead in a Thai remake of
gilligan's island, and when he steps
aside for his handsome friend, he is
properly rewarded with a ludicrously
Saftig Swiss girl of his own. There are
suitable symbolic props, like the blonde
doll the child finds in the park in Zurich
and the jigsaw puzzle of Sleeping Beauty
with the heart piece missing until it is
time for all the romantic lines to disen¬
tangle. There are so many stock
scenes—the prayerful vigil in the hospi¬
tal waiting room, for instance—that
comparison could go on for pages. I will
restrain myself and describe only one
more, a classic scene so perfectly right
that I still feel warm all over thinking
about it.

When the marriage is at its lowest
point, the heroine flies back to Zurich to
stay with the ingenue. A chance meeting
brings in the other man and a formal in¬
troduction follows; so we are hardly sur¬
prised when he arrives and carries the
unhappy woman off for a lovely day in
the Swiss countryside. As she sits on a
rock fishing, cunningly done up in boots
and a bulky jacket, we see him sketching
her. Aha, an artist! Some playful busi¬
ness about catching and throwing back a
fish leads to the picnic which is in turn
interrupted when the judiciously placed
distant thunder gives way to studio rain.
As chance would have it, there is a de¬
serted cabin nearby and, as chance
would have it, the door is unlocked,
there is a lamp on the mantelpiece and a
fire layed in the fireplace just waits for
the match. The man sits in front of the
fire while the woman hunkers on a
bench across the room, clutching her cup
of coffee—comfort and defense. He
turns toward her, longing, uncertainty,
the beginning of invitation in his eyes,
and, as chance would have it, at just that
moment the door blows open, the lamp
goes out. A sudden crash of thunder, a
flash of lightning, and she flies into his
arms. Protection turns to desire. They
kiss. Cut to the fire which crackles with
new intensity in the fireplace. You just
can't get scenes like that anymore. 95-

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FILM COMMENT 3

Directors and producer: Alan Rudolph, Robert Benton, and Robert Altman.

While the roar of MGM's Leo has been reduced to little
more than a whimper, another lion is roaring more
loudly than ever. That's the lion of Robert Altman's film
production company—Lion's Gate Films, whose shel¬
tering arms Altman, after producing or co-producing
many of the film s he's made since M*A*S*H, has now ex¬
tended to other filmmakers by acting as producer for
their work.

Altman organized the company in 1970, after M*A*S*H
and before BREWSTER McCLOUD, but he moved into what
would become the Lion's Gate offices, in very un-
Hollywood Westwood, as early as 1965. Since then, the
English Tudor-style complex on Westwood Blvd. in Los
Angeles has developed into a mini-studio, with every¬
thing necessary to make movies—offices, editing rooms,
screening room, etc.—except a sound stage. (Inasmuch
as Altman reportedly hasn't filmed anything in a studio
since M*A*S*H, that hardly seems to matter.) It even has
something none of the studios has: the highly developed
Lion's Gate eight-track sound system, with which
Altman has perfected the crystal-clear reproduction of
overlapping sounds.

Lion's Gate is perhaps the only film company where
an assistant publicist doubles as receptionist one day a
week, and a production assistant works on script out¬
lines and rewrites. Seemingly as much home as factory
for Altman (returning at night from a trip, he drops in at
Lion's Gate even before going home to the Malibu Col¬
ony), the offices are outfitted with pinball machine in the
entrance, full kitchen upstairs, and a large bar in
Altman's office. Nightly this spacious room fills with
cast, crew, and Lions Gate people, relaxing over drinks
before moving on to the screening room to view dailies,
or sometimes just winding down and talking shop. The
atmosphere is loose, friendly, almost familial, with
Altman, the bearded patriarch, leaning casually against

his big wooden desk as he faces the room at large.

During the months of July and August, when I spent
some time there, the Westwood complex was a veritable
hotbed of activity, with various projects in various stages
of development moving along simultaneously—the
most advanced among them being Altman's productions
of Alan Rudolph's WELCOME TO L.A. and Robert Benton's
THE LATE SHOW. Ironically, amidst this enterprise Altman
was at the same time suffering the most publicized re¬
verses of his career. BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, his
$6,500,000 film for Dino De Laurentiis, opened through¬
out the country to mixed reviews and disappointing
boxoffice. Concurrently, month-old rumors became fact:
Altman was off RAGTIME, the film version of E.L. Doc-
torow's best-selling novel which De Laurentiis had
bought and signed Altman to direct. The dispute was
widely covered in newspapers as well as in the trades;
the reason given was that catchall phrase “artistic differ¬
ences." Indeed, Altman wanted to make RAGTIME as two
films of two-and-a-half to three hours in length and sub¬
sequently an expanded version for television of about ten
hours. But De Laurentiis had other ideas. He wanted to
make the film as one regular-length feature.

Around the same time, Altman and Warners parted
company on THE YIG EPOXY, which Altman was to pro¬
duce and direct for that studio with Alan Rudolph
scripting based on a novel. Easy and Hard Ways Out.
Again, “artistic differences" might well describe the
controversy. According to Rudolph, Warners wanted
Altman but not an Altman-style film, and after the first-
draft script the studio was anxious to replace the young
writer with a “real" (more conventional, high-powered)
screenwriter. When it became obvious so early in the
project that Warners' and Altman's conceptions of the
material were miles apart, Altman decided to pull out.

But Altman is one of the most resilient and prolific

4 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

filmmakers working in America today. So while the con¬
troversies over BUFFALO BILL and RAGTIME were flying
around as thick as South American fruit flies, Altman
was already at work on the outline for his next film,
THREE WOMEN, which started shooting in Palm Springs in
September, just as Benton wound shooting on THE LATE
SHOW around L.A., and Rudolph entered the final stages
of editing WELCOME TO L.A. at Lion's Gate.

The obvious question is why Robert Altman should
decide to take on the burdens and responsibilities inher¬
ent to producing. Answer: his avowed desire to help
other filmmakers get their movies made, skirting the
roblems he himself experienced and knows all too well;
e wants to protect other filmmakers as he was never
protected. The idea is to give filmmakers such as
Rudolph and Benton “the room to do it, the opportunity
to make movies the way they want to make them." And
for his first efforts as a producer of others' work, Altman
set two standards: to sponsor films of entertainment
quality and to present movies that might “stretch the
edges of cinema."

It's appropriate that Altman's first two production ef¬
forts of other directors should be by two such disparate
ersonalities as Robert Benton and Alan Rudolph,
enton, a slight, Texas-born New Yorker who chain¬
smokes thin black cigars, is, at 44, an established
screenwriter (BONNIE AND CLYDE, WHAT'S UP, DOC?, BAD
COMPANY, etc., all co-written with David Newman) of
classically structured genre pieces which comment
upon the genre while using it. With the LATE SHOW
(Benton's first solo writing effort and, after BAD COM¬
PANY, his second directorial credit), the style is that of a
Forties detective film set in 1976, complete with bluesy
Forties-style score. The acknowledged influence of THE
LONG GOODBYE is perhaps why Benton's script was sent
to Altman by their mutual agent, Sam Cohn of ICM.
Altman liked the script—the story of Ira Wells, a retired
private eye suffering from ulcers, hired by a kooky
cat-lover to find her kidnapped feline and thus lured
into a nest of complications—and thought the female
lead would be terrific for Lily Tomlin. Now the meticul¬
ous Benton finds himself adapting, if not adopting, the
looser, improvisational Altman style.

In contrast, Alan Rudolph, 32, a long-haired, laid-
back Angeleno, seems to come naturally to the Altman
camp, with his penchant for multi-character, multi¬
level stories in the mode of NASHVILLE, particularly as
evidenced in WELCOME TO L.A. and in his as yet unpro¬
duced adaptation of Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
Lie's considered an Altman protege for having worked
as assistant director on THE LONG GOODBYE, CALIFORNIA
SPLIT, and NASHVILLE; it was during the latter's filming
that WELCOME TO L.A. was conceived. Altman wanted to

f ive Rudolph his first opportunity to direct, so when
udolph approached him with the idea for WELCOME
and Altman liked it and the subsequent script, he pro¬
ceeded to make sure that the project got dune. WEL¬
COME is an impressionistic look at the relationships and
non-relationships of various inhabitants of Los Angel¬
es, cited in the film as the “city of one-night stands";
intercut with, and underscored by, the recording of
male lead Keith Carradine's music (actually written by,
and conducted on-camera by, Richard Baskin). While
WELCOME owes a structural debt to Altman, and par¬
ticularly to NASHVILLE, Rudolph's directorial style does
not. There is almost no improvisation, little overlapping
dialogue, few extras; actors address the camera directly,
as in a European film; the effect is markedly individual,
the look unique, with lighting keyed to the set rather
than the actors passing through it.

Certainly Altman's current project, THREE WOMEN,

reflects his desire to stretch the cinema. It's about two
girls from Texas (Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall) who
work in a spa in an unspecified desert area and become
roommates. Personality changes occur, one adopting
the other's habits. The third woman of the title is Janice
Rule, who paints Minoan-style murals and is the preg¬
nant wife of a Western saloon-keeper. The tone is de¬
scribed as “eerie," and the project brings to mind
Bergman's PERSONA as well as Altman's own IMAGES.

With three women, Altman carries his improvisa¬
tional approach to screenplays to its natural extreme,
shooting without an actual script. He went to Palm
Springs with a forty-page treatment, albeit carefully
worked out and including some dialogue; once filming
began there, Altman worked from the treatment, writing
scenes the night before. (Certain more complex scenes
were planned in advance.) On each day of shooting, he
would discuss the scenes with the cast, within a structure
previously laid out and with which they were familiar. In
other words, action and dialogue were likely to be less
fully specified than in previous films, but the structure
was there and the actors knew what they were doing.

After three women, Altman plans to produce and di¬
rect breakfast of champions, previously announced
and postponed, and E.L. Doctorow's book of daniel, a
fictionalized version of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
case. Producing works by other directors will continue,
although no new projects have yet been set.

Altman's habit of always having another project in the
works, always keeping a couple of steps ahead of him¬
self, is one key to the continued smooth functioning of
Lion's Gate while other independent companies fold.
Altman's financial conservatism is another key. Despite
ecstatic reviews and the cult status of several of his films,
according to an Altman spokesman brewster McCloud,
IMAGES, THIEVES LIKE US, THE LONG GOODBYE, and nOW

buffalo bill are still in the red; but all his films have been
made for under $2,000,000 except McCabe, which was
over $3,000,000, and buffalo bill. (The late show,
welcome to l.a, and three women are also under
$2,000,000 each.) Lion's Gate runs on self-regenerating
financing; Altman's fees and salaries are plowed back
into the company.

Integral to the functioning of Lion's Gate and to
Altman as producer is the delegation of responsibility to
three close associates. Tommy Thompson, who began
his association with Altman on brewster, is the “physi¬
cal producer" with the title of Executive in Charge of
Production. There are two associate producers: Bob
Eg§ enwe il er / who's been with Altman since count¬
down (1968), covers administration and “trouble¬
shooting"; and Scott (Scotty) Bushnell, who started
with thieves LIKE us, heads up creative aspects such as
casting, scripts, and wardrobe.

Recently the Lion's Gate umbrella expanded to in¬
clude a new, separate company, Westwood Editorial,
for postproduction work. Headed by Bill Sawyer, the
company will handle all postproduction work, including
equipment rentals. Lion's Gate eight-track sound sys¬
tem, etc., simplifying the operation of all those functions.

What exactly is the difference between producing for
oneself and producing for others? According to Altman,
“When I both produce and direct, I can make both the
artistic and the business decisions in concert; but when I
produce someone else's work, I make the business deci¬
sions based upon his artistic needs." The epitome of the
creative producer, Altman focuses his knowledge and
experience as a filmmaker on producing, and offers the
support that any normal producer would give, but he
also offers his creative talents. It's an impressive
combination.

FILM COMMENT 5

Robert Benton and THE LATE SHOW

Robert Benton (right) directs Art Carney and Eugene Roche in THE LATE SHOW.

O ne of the movies I've always

loved is RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY.

That's the origin of the late
show, which I first thought of in 1967.
I'm taking that kind of thing and apply¬
ing it to a detective—taking a man past
his time, a man who's historically been
outlived, and putting him in a slightly
later time at the end of his life. David
Newman and I talked about it for a while
and we came up with some ideas. And
then we dropped it and weren't really in¬
terested in it for a long time. And I would
come back to thinking about it from time
to time and making notes.

The story was originally set in New
York, but I later changed the location to
California—simply because the great
private eye fiction is really about Los
Angeles and San Francisco. I can't think
of a major private eye fictional character
that has ever existed in New York ... I
guess Nick Charles. But Lew Archer and
Philip Marlowe and the rest essentially

all operated in California, so I made that
shift.

Then in 1970 my father died. And in
the last part his life, two years before he
died, he was told he needed an opera¬
tion. And he would not have it. He'd been
through an operation in which they cut
out part of his stomach; he had a perfo¬
rated ulcer. He lived on Alka Seltzer. He
was a man of enormous courage. But he
could not make himself go through
another operation. And that's why he
died. That sort of was something I was
thinking about a lot. Ira Wells, the detec¬
tive, is very much based on my father—
this kind of very quiet person who does
not talk a lot and who is capable of this
kind of rage, vented toward other people
but really directed at himself.

When I came back to Hollywood in the
spring of '72 to begin editing bad com¬
pany, I think within the first week I was
back, I wrote the opening scene of the
late show intact. And then I got in¬

volved in editing and I just dropped it.
Then a couple years later, David and his
wife Leslie went to France to shoot their
script, THE CRAZY AMERICAN GIRL, and I
said to myself, "Okay, I'm gonna do a
screenplay on my own while he's gone."
I was really interested in doing some¬
thing else, and I came across this open¬
ing scene and liked it very much.

I'd always worked with David in a
very, very structured way, where we
outlined everything very carefully. We
used to do treatments that had every¬
thing, including camera moves, except
the dialogue. The treatment for bonnie
and Clyde turned out to be almost
ninety pages long. That would really, in
effect, be a first draft for us that we
would never show anybody else. And
then we would do a first draft for every¬
body else.

But I began the late show without
any kind of an outline. This is a ratio¬
nalization now, but I did say at the time

6 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

that as an experiment I wanted to see
what would happen if I were to begin a
script with a character in a situation and
see what happens from scene to scene to
scene, without deciding what the ending
was—let the picture end itself and let the
characters who would come into it come
into it.

I did one draft and gave it to Sam Cohn
and Arlene Donovan at ICM, and gave a
copy to Arthur Penn. They liked it very
much and gave me criticisms. And I gave
it to David to read. That was in January
or February of '75. In July I said, Tm
going to stay in New York and lock my¬
self in the apartment for two weeks and
just rewrite this." So Sally [Mrs. Benton]
went to Martha's Vineyard with our son.
I stayed in the apartment. I only went out
to get groceries, or to get breakfast
somewhere and take a walk—just to

avoid going crazy. I got to the Vineyard
the day before Labor Day, and I still
wasn't finished with the rewrite. I'm a
very slow writer. The middle of Septem¬
ber, we came back and I finished it then. I
sat on it for another month and then re¬
read it and made corrections, and then
gave it to Sam who gave it to Bob
Altman. From there, it happened very
quickly.

Why did Sam Cohn think that Altman
might want to produce it?

I don't know. I'm an enormous ad¬
mirer of nashville, in fact, all of Bob's
films—and this film is greatly influenced
by the long goodbye. The character of
Ira Wells comes from the long goodbye,
and Birdwell, the villain, has a strong re¬
lationship to Marty Augustine. Sam's
well aware of what I think of Bob's films,
how much I admire him, and how influ¬
enced this is by the long goodbye.

At what point did you decide that you
wanted to direct the late show?

From the beginning—not when I first
thought about it, but from the beginning
of that first draft.

Is there a difference, writing a script for
yourself as director, or writing a script that's
going to be submitted around?

To write a screenplay, you have to pre¬
tend, you have to lie to yourself and say
you're going to direct it, even though
you know you're not, in that first draft
before there's a director assigned. I think
that every screenwriter basically believes
he's going to direct that movie when he's
writing it—just the way every actor
comes to believe he is that person, or he
has to come to believe, moment by mo¬
ment, he is that person. You've gotta
write the kind of movie you would like to
direct or you would like to see.

Did you have trepidation going into it?

Oh, sure. Absolutely terrified. But I

just didn't have any choice. I still can't
tell anything about it. I can't tell if it's like
the work David and I do together, or if
it's very different.

W hen you wrote the late show, did
you have anybody in mind to play the
two leads?

Ah, Spencer Tracy and—who did I
have for the girl? Neither of them were
people who were remotely possible.

What made you think of Art and Lily once
you started casting the late show?

Well, I knew Art—not personally, but
I knew his work from The Rope Dancers
on Broadway—he was brilliant. And
harry and tonto. I think he's an incred¬
ibly fine actor; he was my first choice.
One of the things that attracted me to Art
was that he had the virtue of never hav¬
ing done this kind of thing before. I just
felt he would be terrific for it.

Lily was Bob's idea. When Bob read
the script, he said, "This would be ter¬

rific for Lily." It meant a certain amount
of rewriting, but I have always loved her
as a performer, and in nashville I just
thought she was brilliant. Aside from
what a spectacular actress she is in that
film, there's something in her that's like
the whole moral center of that film, for
me.

Then Warners said yes, they would do
it with that cast. And they were good
chemistry together. They really re¬
spected one another as performers, so
that made everything simple for me.

Did Art and Lily help in shaping the
characters?

One of the things I learned from Bob is
that an actor's input into a character is in¬
credibly valuable, that an actor's not just
there to illustrate what you wrote, but in
fact, whatever they bring to the character
you should take seriously. Actors are
precisely not cattle. In the end, whatever
that character is, is not necessarily what
the writer wrote, but a kind of collabora¬
tion that comes between the writer, and
the director, and the actor. Neither one
of them creates the whole character; they
all work together to make it function.

I had really come out of that writers
school that thought the actor should dot
the "i" and put in all the commas. So this
was terrific for me, to see what happened
when they didn't. Lily and Art some¬
times got something truer in the charac¬
ter, or left out things that were wrong
when I'd written them. One of the great
advantages of rehearsals hadn't to do
with changing performances, but with
changing the writing—sections, or
phrases, or things that could be dropped
because they just didn't feel right.

How did you change the character Lily
plays? And how did she participate in chang¬
ing it, in what direction?

The character Lily plays was original¬
ly, I would think, younger than Lily,
somebody in her very early twenties,
somebody whose every other word was
some kind of profanity. The terrific thing
about working with Lily is that she's a
writer. So it's like extending that collab¬
oration not only to an actor, but to a
writer as well. Many of the lines in the
picture are her lines. But they are always
astoundingly true to the character. In a
funny way, her insights into that charac¬
ter—as a writer and as a woman and as
an actress—were much sharper than my
own insights into that character.

The couple of days I was on the set, I
noticed that while certain shots were being set
up, you were rewriting the next day's
dialogue.

On this film I tended to do an enor¬
mous amount of rewriting in the process
of shooting, simply because as things
would happen, they would seem to call
for other things to happen. And they
would call for different responses. I
would see something—a hole I'd left in
the mystery—and think, "Wait a mi-

Art Carney and Lily Tomlin hold up a wounded Bill Macy in THE LATE SHOW.

FILM COMMENT 7

nute, let me do this." And so I would
write a short scene and put it in. And
thank God we had the freedom to add
those scenes. When we finally got to that
last scene, I wanted a kind of looseness, a
relaxed thing in Art that I'd never seen,
so I decided to just let him do it right on
the spot.

How much rehearsal did you do before
shooting and how much during it?

We had about a week off and on, of re¬
hearsal, but only one read-through.
Then I went back and did specific scenes.
There would be times when it was im¬
possible to rehearse. Where we had it I
would take it. It would depend on the
nature of the scene.

There were times when Lily would
want a lot of time to rehearse, or where
Art would need the time. He tended to
need the time for a whole other set of
reasons than Lily. So it was just balanc¬
ing off the needs of the actors to re¬
hearse.

Art knew that character right from the
beginning. They each had a very strong
grasp of the character. I don't think I did
much directing on this picture. I really
tried to sort of stay out of their way until
they hit a problem—with the scene, or
with the moment—and then I tried to re¬
solve it.

Art seemed to fit his role perfectly . I could
see Lily doing much more work.

Yes. But they come out of very differ¬
ent schools of acting. That's going to be
interesting if those two styles work to¬
gether. I think they do. They are exactly
the opposite styles from one another. It
was fascinating to deal with them.

H ow did Bob Altman function as the pro¬
ducer?

He functioned extremely well as the
producer. In that there's a lot of the final
script that you're reading, that's differ¬
ent from the first draft. Scotty Bushnell
[Altman's associate producer] and I
worked on the script together every day.
When we'd get a section done, we'd
show it to Bob and he would say, "This I
like; this is a problem." He came to it
with a fresh eye and said, "Wait a min¬
ute. You're getting trapped by your loca¬
tions. Look and see this number of pages
that you're here." Or he would say,
"You don't need this piece of informa¬
tion in words—show it."

Also, the nature of the people you
work with here at Lion's Gate is very dif¬
ferent from most places. It's a looser and
more easy-going group. There is an
enormous amount of input from a lot of
people, which you're free to take or not
as you choose. And there's a kind of
free-flowing thing in which everyone
moves from one area to another, in
which nobody functions specifically
cubby-holed into one role.

There was no harassment about the
schedule; everybody's left us very much

alone. I think David Geffen [production
executive at Warners] came and saw the
picture after about three weeks of shoot¬
ing, and liked it very much. And then
about a week later, some of the other
executives from Warners came out and
saw it, and they liked it very much. And
then we didn't hear anything else from
them until two or three days ago when
the publicity people came over. And
that's it.

And as for Bob—I would have to ask
Bob to come to the set. Once shooting
started he maintained a hands-off at¬
titude, except he was very encouraging.
He's terrific to work for for that reason,
because he offers you a kind of stability
and encouragement to say, "Just keep
going and go wilder." That was really
wonderful.

In bad company, I really locked up the
whole picture. I worked out the picture
with [cinematographer] Gordy Willis
shot-by-shot, on locations, before we
even got the actors there. On the late
show I would work it out in my head the
night before. I really went much more by
the seat of my pants this time. I also
wanted a much looser kind of picture.
[For bad company] I had established a
very rigid set of limitations, and I'm very
glad I did. But this time I wanted to see
what happened if I went in the opposite
direction and didn't figure things out in
advance and sort of let things happen.

It does sound as if you've been influenced
by Altman.

Oh very. The first thing he said to me
when I got out here was, "Look, this is
just another movie. Don't make it as
though it's the last movie you're ever
gonna make. Because then you'll just
drive it crazy. Let it happen and go in
and do it as well as you can and go on to
the next one." You cannot be around
him without being influenced by him.
His influence is all through this pic¬
ture—I mean, from the fact that I would
have sworn a year ago that I never would
allow any kind of improvisation.

He never once said, "Why'd you do it
that way?" He did say to me at times, "I
could never make this kind of movie.
This is the opposite movie from the kind
of movies that I make." But he never
once said, "Don't do that," or "What you
need here is this kind of shot." Basically,
it's been interesting just to work with
him, and I'm going to be curious about
the results, because it is so opposite. I re¬
ally can't tell about it, in that way. If you
talk to Bob about it, he says it's a very
non-Altman film. But I suspect if you see
it from the outside you will be able to see
very clear influences of Altman.

How did Bob as a producer differ from
other producers you've worked with?

Stanley Jaffe's a terrific producer. And
he's a very good friend. He set up a thing
on bad company in which I had incredi¬
ble security. Because I had Gordy Willis;

I had Howard Koch who was a great
A.D., who's now a producer; I had
Anthea Sylbert; I had Paul Sylbert.
Enormous number of people to fall back
on, and a long period to prepare the film.

There came a point on the late show,
about a week, two weeks before we
started shooting, when I said, "I want to
delay production a week, because the
script is still twenty pages too long. I
want to cut it back now, not while I'm
shooting." Bob said no. He said, "It's
that same old thing, where you take a kid
out and you say, 'You want to learn how
to swim? Here.' And you throw him into
the water." It was the only time that we
ever had an argument. And that was as
close to an artistic decision—because he
knew that I would have to make a more
fluid picture by jumping into it. Each

Tomlin and Carney.

week I would delay it, by virtue of cut¬
ting things out, I would have formalized
things more.

Altman never said, "We're not gonna
do this because we can't afford to do it."
We used all real locations and that was
no savings of money. It was never meant
to save money. I assumed that we would
work in a studio for at least two of the lo¬
cations which are not tied into interior/
exterior that way. And Bob said to do it
all real locations. By working in a real
place, people get to feel the reality of it.

A lot of the crew has worked on other
Altman films. How influential was Altman
in your selecting crew members? For in¬
stance , how did you come to choose Chuck
Rosher as your cinematographer?

Bob was very influential. He said,
"Pick a cameraman who doesn't come to
you with an already formed style. Let the
cameraman's style serve—maybe it
won't be as beautiful a picture, but it's
not so important that it be a beautiful pic¬
ture. Let it take its own look." So we
talked to a lot of cameramen and Chuck

8 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

was the one that I liked the best. He'd
done a lot of TV commercials; he did
adam at six a.m.; and he did pretty
maids all in A row. And that was it. I
think he'd done one other picture that's
never gotten released. And Bob knew his
work and liked it. And I'm very glad I
took Chuck.

The look of a film is very important to
me. I can't tell what the look of this film is
now. The limitations I set were two op¬
posite ones. I said I didn't want there to
be colors predominant in this picture. I
wanted all colors to be somehow mixed
with other colors, so that there was never
a pure red or a pure blue or a pure yellow
in this picture.

Chuck and I spent a lot of time talking
about old Warners films. What I think he
was trying to do, and I think did very

Eugene Roche, Bill Macy, and John Considine.

successfully, is somehow, with that
lighting, find a color equivalent of those
old black-and-white Warner Bros, films.
Because his lighting is so painstaking, it
does remind you of those pictures. I had
also decided to move the camera a lot,
which had really been an early decision
of mine on this picture. Watching
David's picture, crazy American girl,
where the camera's often on the move, I
suddenly realized that a moving camera
can give a kind of energy, a kind of
rhythm and momentum. And I went
with a lot more close-ups in this picture.

Many writers who move from writing to
directing are still word-oriented. Whereas
your background in art must have a strong ef¬
fect on how you view films and how you make
them.

Yes. I'd gone to study art at Columbia,
and then worked as an illustrator and
eventually became art director at Esquire ,
where David was an editor. Actually,
Bob Altman was trained as an artist and
worked as a writer—as a cartoonist,
which is what I wanted to be as a kid.

As an art student I was indelibly influ¬
enced by the surrealistic vision—so that
the films that had the greatest influence
on me when I was in college were things
like Cocteau's eternal return. What
I've learned as a painter from watching
those films was that surrealism and Coc¬
teau's vision extended into the least ob¬
viously surrealistic works that he had
done. Orpheus made a tremendous im¬
pression on me. But that's how I sort of
made whatever move that was, from
painting into whatever this is.

I have a funny feeling, and I couldn't
begin to substantiate it, that the relation¬
ship between movies and painting is in a
way much stronger than the relationship
between movies and writing, and
movies and theater. Because in the end,
it really is that flat two-dimensional

image or series of images up there that
remains with you. In the long goodbye,
that sequence when Sterling Hayden
drowns himself and that dog running
back and forth with that stick—there is
no acting in the world that's gonna be
as moving as the image of that Dober¬
man.

Anyway, that's just a cockamamie
idea. And I'm not sure it's true.

W hat directors have influenced your
work in general? Either writing or di¬
recting.

As for directors, Truffaut and God¬
ard—because a lot of what I feel about
film came together in the Sixties with the
New Wave. Arthur Penn has been a tre¬
mendous influence. Joe Mankiewicz.
Renoir. And in this picture, it's easy to
see Altman's influence.

But Hawks is probably the most pro¬
found influence of all. In terms of the fact
that I will always betray the story for the
character. If you assume that what
people call the bottom line of whatever

you do is what you won't betray, then I
will always betray story for character—
not necessarily for the betterment of the
film. It's just an emotional thing that I
feel.

Superman, which David and I did a
rewrite on, was another kind of chal¬
lenge: plot engineering. I've really got¬
ten interested in storytelling—because
I'm not very good at it. I would like to
learn how to do it, if you can learn some¬
thing like that. There are terrific storytel¬
ling writers. Bob Towne is a wonderful
writer on any level, but he really does
know how to tell a story and keep the
characters rich and alive. I think Walter
Hill is very good at that. Michael
Crichton is very good at that.

What's the other side of successful
screenwriting , besides being a storyteller?

Well, there are people who are great
storytellers; there are people who are
character writers; there are people who
are situation writers; there are people
who are idea writers. And they each
have their own kind of validity. For a
long time it became fashionable not to
like the storytelling type of film writing.
David and I gave a lecture at Aspen
about three years ago, called "The End of
the Well-Made Film"—that the influence
of the New Wave had been to destroy the
concept of the well-made film. And I
think that concept is now coming back.

Doesn't Bob Altman work against that?

Nashville is a great example of some¬
body who knew how to do twenty
stories, and knew how little of a story
you had to know to keep it fascinating.
Because you really do have to know very
little. It's that every one of those stories
was such a rich, dense, wonderful story.

How do you feel about the current trend in
American films , moving away from the con¬
cern for character?

There are brilliant movies in which the
characters are just sketched in. They be¬
come like Matisse doing a drawing: it's
just a circle and two dots and another
mark for the nose and another mark for
the mouth. It doesn't have to be a fully
rendered, rounded, three-dimensional,
academic version of a portrait to be as
powerful. It doesn't mean in those
movies that character doesn't exist. It
just means that it's done much more
economically, and done by implication
rather than by being explicit about the
character. I have great respect for those
people who write like that.

But I don't want to generalize. You
see, the thing I've discovered is that I
have no critical faculties. I'm not able to
look at another person's work as a critic,
or to look at a body of work and its trend,
with that kind of distance that writers
like Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael
have. When I look at a movie, I look for
something I can steal. ?>•

FILM COMMENT 9

Alan Rudolph and WELCOME TO L.A.

M y dad is a retired TV director.

He directed a lot of television in
the Fifties—mostly filmed
half-hour comedies like The Boh Cum¬
mings Show and The Donna Reed Show and
The Ann Sothern Show. And he did some
really nice things: Ford Theater , which
wasn't comedy, and then he did a couple
of Playhouse 90' s. I started in the mail-
room at Paramount, and then in 1967 I
got into The Directors Guild Training
Program. I became a Second Assistant
Director, then a First A.D. really quick. I
was one of the youngest Firsts around. I
worked on a lot of very mediocre, func¬
tional things. Worked on some of the
first movies for television. I worked on
about fifteen of those at Paramount. And
a couple of features.

Then I just quit. And so I spent two
years just doing nothing but writing and
what-not. And then I got a call from
Tommy Thompson, who I'd never met,
who said, "You want to work?" And I
said, "No, I don't work for anybody. I
-don't wanna work ever again. Who's
making the movie?" And he said,
"Altman." At this time, m*a*s*h,
McCabe, and brewster all were out—and
I hadn't seen any of 'em. I said, "Oh, he's
that young Canadian guy." And Tommy
said, "No, not actually ..." And I said,
"Well, can I call you Monday?" And he
said, "Fine." So that weekend, I got
pretty unfocused and I went out and saw
all the movies that were out, including
mccabe and mrs. miller, and I really
knew that was the place to be. And so, I
came over here and started working.

The LONG goodbye, I worked with
Tommy as assistant director. I was listed
as the second A.D. When I started work¬
ing with Tommy and Bob, I hadn't been a
second for something like four years.
And with them, it wasn't like being a
second. Bob would let me do things, and
so would Tommy. I wasn't after career,
so I didn't care about the credit. Since I
worked with Bob, I haven't worked with
anybody else on films.

After the long goodbye, they went on
to do thieves like us, and I said, "This
has been the best, but I just can't work
anymore like this." So I went out and
wrote some things and did some films
and stuff. And then Bob called me up for
California split and said, "Listen,
we've designed an eight-track sound
system. I know you don't like to be an as¬
sistant, but this could be different be¬
cause I'll let you just handle the rest of

the movie. I'll take care of my movie and
you take care of yours, and we'll experi¬
ment with these mikes."

So we hired thousands of extras from
Synanon, and I dealt with everything
other than George Segal and Elliott
Gould. And we have a whole movie
there. In the dailies it was a lot of fun
sometimes, because the sound of the
background people was just as perfect as
the sound of the foreground people. Bob
kept talking about the atmosphere. He
wanted these two guys to just come out
of the atmosphere.

After California split I "retired"
again. And they lured me back, but by
this time I had been bitten. Bob said,
"Now, nashville, you're getting closer,
because there are twenty-four actors and
I can't deal with them all." Nashville
was a very closed creative fist. There was
Bob and Scotty Bushnell [Altman's as¬
sociate producer] and Joan Tewkesbury
[the film's screenwriter] and Richard
Baskin [the musical director], and me.
That was a great experience, nashville.
Because you were living it, all the time.
All you had to do was turn on the
cameras, and there you were, you re¬
corded some of it. The actors got into
who they were, and everybody else
changed too.

Then after that, at the July Fourth
party. Bob said, "You're ready." Because
during all this time, I was always talking
to people, low-budget people that would
contact me: "Do you wanna make a
low-budget movie?" Those things rarely
fulfill themselves. But I really knew what
I wanted to do, and Bob saw something
and said, "Okay, you can do it. I'll run all
the interference I can, and we'll see if we
can get this together."

R ichard Baskin and I had become very
close friends, and one rainy day in
Nashville he said, "Listen to this song.
What do you think?" And he played this
song, which was part of a suite he'd writ¬
ten. And the song is called "Best Temp¬
tation of All." And it was sort of like the
catalyst for all these ideas. When you get
loaded and it's raining outside—and I
live by moods anyway—and I said, "Oh,
I can write a whole movie about that." So
Richard and I got involved with using his
songs as sort of the narrative of this story
idea that I had. Richard and I overlap.
And Bob and I overlap. Richard and Bob
overlap. Sometimes we all overlap. But
neither of us is the other person. So we

Richard Baskin in WELCOME TO L.A.

can all go out and do something, and ob-
viously Bob's influence would be
everywhere, but I think you can find me.
I mean. I'll let that movie speak for itself,
for me.

And so Bob said, "Fine, if that's what
you want to do, let's see if we can get it
done."

Had you presented a script to him at that
point?

No. I'd written about five scripts and I
just didn't want to be one of those guys
saying, "Hey Bob! Guess what I got!"
Because when they hired me, I saw what
was goin' on here and I knew that this
was something that I would never lose in
my life, even if I became a bricklayer,
which I've often thought of becoming. I
was never one of those career persons.
Every leap I made just happened to me.
I've never been on an interview in my life
for anything.

10 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

And so I wrote a script when we came
back here. I drove back with my wife,
Joyce, and she and I kinda talked it out. I
got a lot of visual ideas talking to her,
'cause she's an artist, a potter, and she
knows a lot about art. She found me a
postcard in New York at the Whitney
Museum by an artist named Jack Beal. A
contemporary American. He's a realist, a
super-realist. But unlike most super-

Viveca Lindfors.

realists, he doesn't do a '59 Chevy
pickup in front of a Bob's. He'll do
people in patterns, in an ultrareal way,
but not quite real at all. And all I've ever
wanted to do is to show reality through
an unreal set of eyes. I wanted to create
an unreal movie about reality. So Joyce
gave me this postcard and said, "This
sounds like what you want." It really
started me on a whole pattern approach
to this film, a whole style.

Style became very important to this
film because I was looking for a way to
translate the music onto the screen with¬
out scoring it. Richard and I would wres¬
tle with all kinds of theories and proba¬
bly if we had taken half the ideas that
we'd discussed to the limit, we'd have a
most radical film. But we kept cutting
back because we found that what we
were dealing with was rather conven¬
tional stuff. Emotional lifes and deaths

are universal and timeless, and to go too
far in style would take away from it.

I said, "I don't want to see any more
people other than the people we deal
with. I don't want to see anybody on the
street; I don't want to go outside. I just
want to deal with the interiors of these
people. And I want to deal with people
that are immediately identifiable." As
soon as you see them, you say, "Oh, I
know all about that person and what
they're like." So you get surprised along
the way.

But more than that, I was really deal¬
ing with the place where the brush
touches the canvas. That's what the
movie's kind of about. It wasn't so much
about the canvas itself, although that's
getting most of the comment. The hand¬
ful of people that have seen it talk a lot
about the characters, which is exactly
right. But to truly understand it, or at
least for me to understand what I was
trying to do. I've got to pull back further.

When we got back from Nash¬
ville, I wrote a script in like ten days. Bob
said, "Oh, that's really good," and we
started to adjust a little bit, and then I
had a hot idea about the style. I had a
140-page script, the longest thing I'd
ever written. And then I said, "We can't
show all the details, it wouldn't be fair
because the details are apparent
everywhere. And that's not where the
focus should be. But I want the details
present." So I went through the script
again and cleaned out the things that
were apparent in other things. The
movie is spare, very spare. That may be
annoying to some people; they may
Want more. But I'd be afraid to change
another frame. It's very lean—down to
the bone.

The opening reel and a half is very con¬
fusing because it's very obvious what's
going on, but you're not being told
what's going on. There's no mystery to
it. But you don't really understand that
you're getting it, because you're
seeing—here's an event with people. All
right, that's true. Here's another event
with some of the same people and differ¬
ent people. And we do that with all these
characters until we meet the main
character, Keith Carradine. I wanted us
to meet all the people, and then I wanted
to meet Keith. And then, I wanted to
meet all the people with Keith, and
through Keith. And then, I wanted all
the people to meet each other. And then
I wanted to see who emerged.

We quickly had the second script, and
we got some interest in it. Some people
read it and said, "Whooh!" Other people
read it and said, "Ugh." But you had to
figure, "What do they all mean by that?
And what can I get out of it?" I had the
script by September, and we figured the
picture had to go in December or Janu¬
ary. When that time came and went,
there were a lot of discussions whether

we should go for something else, or Bob
should try to make it and I should just
have written it. Then, Bob got buffalo
bill and said, "Do you want to write it?"
So he kinda structured it and I wrote it.

And then, in the middle of that, he
said, "Do you want to write breakfast
of champions?" So between drafts of
buffalo bill, I wrote breakfast in eight
days, and it's the single best writing I've
ever done. I hope that movie gets made!
They had a great cast locked , I think: Peter
Falk, Lily Tomlin was gonna play all
three wives. Sterling Hayden was Kilroy
Trout, Alice Cooper was Bunny Hoover.
Breakfast was very close, then all of a
sudden it was very distant. I think
everybody got scared because it's a
pretty weird movie. But I think it could
have been a very important movie—not
important for society, because I don't
know what that means—but I mean, for
all of us. It was very close to something
that Bob was just geared for. If that
movie had gotten made then, you would
have seen a lot of Bob that you could un¬
derstand.

After buffalo bill I had more credibil¬
ity and Bob had a good relationship with
UA and we made the deal for welcome.
Very quickly Sam Cohn got involved,
and suddenly somebody knew who I
was, and Bob's word was worth a lot, so
they said fine, if you can do it for less
than a million dollars go ahead. We de¬
ferred a couple of hundred thousand,
and the production costs were like 900,
and I think the to.tal cost was like a mil¬
lion one, two: it was very inexpensive.

Did you use much improvisation?

I'm not a dramatics student. I know
there is a pure form of improvisation that
by its very purity becomes non-improvi¬
sation. We didn't have any rehearsals be¬
fore shooting. While shooting all we did
was rehearse and at some time turn the
cameras on it. That way you keep it as
fresh as possible. I wouldn't know what
to do, sitting down with an actor in a
room six months ahead of time and hav¬
ing him read.

I tend to write on my feet a lot, I can
throw dialogue very easily. Bob taught
me, what you try and do is create a real¬
ity, even if it's not a real reality, create a
rhythm. The most important thing is
either the information or the emotional
level. And depending on what the scene
is you work from there. Then when
you're filming it shouldn't be any differ¬
ent than a beat before you started filming
or a beat after.

I thought the most difficult part of film¬
ing would be dealing with the actors. It
was so easy and they seemed to trust me
so much that there was really very little
resistance or counterproductivity. It
helped that all the actors, when they
read the script, wanted to do it. That was
exciting.

Did the actors work for very low salaries ,

FILM COMMENT 11

There's no main character in welcome to l. a. The shape of it is like a pyramid. It starts with everybody, and as we
come to a close we drop characters. The last four to reach a conclusion are Keith, Geraldine, Harvey, and Sissy.

Harvey Keitel was the first to read
it, and he wanted to play all the male
parts. I said, "Can you sing?" He said
no, and I said, "Here's the one I think
is good for you." His part [the role of
Kenneth Hood] is actually the
dramatic male focus; Harvey sym¬
bolizes a lot of male-kind. Harvey,
who does deep analyses of his
characters, came up with some really
good things. He did a major improvi¬
sation only once, and it really
worked. It was like watching a karate
expert about to break a brick.

Keith Carradine was an obvious
choice because of his ability to sing.
But more than that, the guy Keith
plays is a Mister Mum. I was looking
for somebody who was just a blank
piece of paper, which may be the
place that most of the criticism is
leveled. But it's very obvious what's
going on there: he's the one who
learns. And that's all that's supposed
to happen. You take one guy and it's
like going through a car wash; you
come out the other end clean, or
scratched—Keith is both. Keith is
brilliant. I think this picture will put
him on that level that he'll really ap¬
pear as a star. Because he has that
Mr. Mystery feel. He has a little
James Dean, or a little Clint East-
wood; you don't know what he's
thinking. Keith to me is one of the
most appealing people to watch, just
to look at him.

Geraldine Chaplin: When I met
her on nashville, I thought, "Here's
an advanced race and I'm privileged
just to be in the same universe with
her." There's a magic about Geral¬
dine Chaplin that's no mystery; just
look at her genes. On nashville I
was a little scared of her; on buffalo
bill she was my first choice for
Annie Oakley because that woman is
just incredible. The character of
Karen was very important to me. We
talked to a few people, and I said,
"Geraldine, I would really like you to
be in my movie, but I would under¬
stand if you didn't want to." And she
said, "I thought you'd never ask!"
She had her arm in a sling, and it was
the only day it snowed in Calgary,
and she just rolled in the snow.
When people get excited about
something that's yours, you know
you can do anything. Geraldine
added a lot of highlights to the
character.

Denver Pyle I met up there. I
needed a character for Keith's father
and Harvey's boss and Lauren's
lover. I was very impressed with Ben
Johnson in last picture show: we all
knew who he was, and then he was
rediscovered twenty years after he
started. Denver I felt was the same
way; he's got a look and a voice that
people know, but they don't know
what city he's from. He's got a
character In this that might bring a
dramatic focus to him that he didn't
have. I think he's great.

Lauren Hutton was up there in
Calgary, where buffalo bill was
shot, and I got to know her, and I
said there was a character she would
be right for. On paper it didn't take
up the space or the others, but it
would get into something. And she
said fine.

John Considine was up there.
What that man can do! He got re¬
venge in this movie. The movie's re¬
ally a classy soap opera—or an un-
classy soap opera, I don't know yet
—it's like all those characters on TV
after the TV's turned off and they go
home. And John, who played in a
soap opera for many years, really
knew what he was doing.

Sissy Spacek: I got a telegram from
Harry Ufland, who's Harvey's agent,
and Keith's agent. It said: "Please
watch television tonight because
Sissy Spacek's in a thing called
katherine." I didn't see it and I'd
never seen Sissy Spacek, but I was so
flattered that somebody would send
me a telegram as a director that when
we came back here I said "I think we
should talk to Sissy Spacek." So she
came in one day ana there was so
much energy and life there. She has
this dial on her forehead, she can be¬
come so many people. When she's
forty years old—between now and
then she'll do incredible things, but
when she turns forty she will just
start to soar, she'll become like
Katharine Hepburn. She knows how
smart she is but she doesn't use it, so
she has this very interesting balance
of wisdom and rawness. She comes
across like a woman-girl and a girl-
woman.

Viveca Lindfors called Bob and
said, "I'd like to work with you." Bob
said to me, "Do you know who Viv¬
eca Lindfors is?" I said, "I think so,
but I have a big gap ... I know she
was pretty." I met her the day we
started shooting, and she was like
the grande dame of the company. She
could teach us all. She only worked
ten days, and I'll never forget that, it
was just too special.

Sally Kellerman. For the thirty-
five-year-old housewife, for a vague
connection I wanted an English lady,
just because Keith's character was
supposed to have lived in England
and it would have been a way to start
a conversation. We thought of
Susannah York and Billie Whitelaw,
but we were working on such a limi¬
ted budget we couldn't fly over or
have them fly over; we had to make a
decision. Sally Kellerman came up to
Calgary to visit, and I said, "Do you
ever do real movies, or do you al¬
ways have to show your tits and have
a gun?" and she said, "Nobody of¬
fers me real parts." Bob thinks she's
great; she is special.

The problem with my movie is that
you could have made a full movie all
about Sally Kellerman or Viveca
Lindfors.

12 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

as they did on nashville ?

Yeah. They got a little more, and there
were some deferments, and some per¬
centages. But basically they were work¬
ing out of love, which is something you
can't pay for.

Because this was my first film, I was
very possessive about everything. I
helped design all the things. We didn't
have very much money, so it means you
have to come up with ideas, which have
no price. The sets were all real. We had a
great set decorator who could get any¬
thing I asked for, Dennis Parrish. He did
buffalo bill; he did Benton's movie.
He's like an actor; he's really got to delve
into the history of these characters as
much as the actors.

Who was your cinematographer?

A guy named Dave Myers. He shot
thx 1138. I said, "I don't want a star. I'm
starting out and I don't think my ego's
strong enough to battle another ego.
Ideally I would like someone who's older
and knew how movies were made a long
time ago." Because I wanted this to have
a very definite style, with hard shadows;
but also somebody who knew contem¬
porary filmmaking. I said, "I want to see
the difference between dark brown and
dark blue and black. I want to see the
lighting. I want people to be able to go in
and out of shadows. And I want it to
have the look of a super-realist paint¬
ing." A single person in a colorful frame,
the person is no more or less important
than the frame.

We had a great crew. Benton inherited
my whole crew except for the camera.
Dave's dailies were beautiful; you could
have printed them.

H ow did Altman function as a producer
with you?

It was probably as difficult for him as
for me. I'd never had a relationship with
a producer who was a director, because
I'd never directed before, and he's never
had a producer's relationship with a di¬
rector because he'd never produced be¬
fore. He had to shift gears a lot. His deci¬
sions carry more weight than a line pro¬
ducer. But I didn't feel it was worth mak¬
ing the picture if it would be a carbon
copy of what he would do, and he didn't
want that either. We worked closely be¬
fore I started shooting, and if he had
suggestions he would soften it so that I
had my say first. During shooting he
functioned more as protection than as an
influence, till after the first cut. Then he
brought a clarity to the editing that he
probably doesn't even get to enjoy on his
own films because of his closeness to
them. We cut through all the problems
we might have as people; any problems
we had were more on a functional level.
I've got my own identity, but I'm proud
to be associated with him.

I feel really close to Bob as a person.
Brilliant people are not easy to get close

to. They're protective of what they do,
because they're suspicious of people,
and on the other side, people are insin¬
cere. But because I've known Bob for five
years and have worked on four of his
movies, we have a silent understanding.
We get into that second and third and
fourth level of understanding which is
rare. And I think he learned a lot from
producing my movie.

There's a certain amount of flattery in
being called Bob Altman's protege, but
there's a certain amount of hype in that
too. I was me before I met him. I didn't
want anybody to think this would be
nashville part ii. But he's really saved
me about five years of hard work. He
said, "There's some talent there, let's get
it to the surface, let's not wait." He's the
consummate producer, in that he saw
something he liked and he got it done. I
believe in his vision, and I also have a dif¬
ferent vision of my own. I look within.
Bob looks without. He has a much
broader view of things, he understands
the workings of a subject. I get involved
in the moment-to-moment emotional
range. That's why I'm not really good at
plots. My little individuals add up to a
whole, and Bob's whole gets down to in¬
dividuals. The essence of his filmmak¬
ing—and of other great filmmakers—is
to understand the truth before you make
the film, and then spend the film disguis¬
ing it.

Bob's vision is truly unique. And his
vision is also truly identifiable. He's the
only American director, and one of
maybe only three directors in the world,
that you know whose film it is without
ever seeing the credits. No one really has
tried—thankfully—to copy Bob, either
because so many people are intimidated
by it, they don't really know how to do
that, or they're just really turned off by it.

Bob needs one more blank filled in and
then he'll be the consummate film per¬
son. And that is really that he somehow
has to be involved—and he'll probably
be one of the first that is involved—with
a new, revolutionary way to distribute
films, the artist's distributing company.
United Artists has been so good to me; of
course, I think that's because Bob has
acted as a buffer. And I sense that they all
really want to help. I don't know if they
can, or they will, but I sense that they re¬
ally want to. But it's that part of making
films that kills most of the films.

In terms of some of the elements that
Altman has emphasized in his films , such as
development of sound, how does that apply to
welcome to l.a. ? Did you use the same
sound system , the Dolby system?

We used the same sound system,
which is an 8-track, Lion's Gate 8-track,
which probably wasn't necessary on my
film, except for the music. In my film,
there's very little overlapping dialogue,
but as a principle of sound, it's ingeni¬
ous. And if I have to work without it, I

don't know what I'll do—and I probably
will have to work without it, because it
only exists here.

Is that one of the advantages of Lion's Gate
as an organization?

Yes. But the true advantage of Lion's
Gate is the spontaneity. You can get an
idea and you can follow it all the way
through three buildings and go see it on
the screen. You can see your stuff here.
And it's so enclosed—there's a few
pieces that are missing, but they're
rapidly being filled in. It's like a big ma¬
chine at your disposal. And sometimes it
gets unwieldy, but it's really dreamland.

Working at Lion's Gate is—it's really a
film cookie jar. Or better than that, it's a
test tube. If you've ever had a desire to go
into a lab and start mixing things and see
what happens, this is where it happens.
The whole essence of what Lion's Gate is
coming to mean—and now it's meaning
more than Bob, it's really a spirit of
filmmaking—is to create. Just to create. It
allows you to take your ideas and have
them bear fruit. Which working back¬
wards means you are now responsible
for your own ideas, which means if you
come up with an idea here, you'll proba¬
bly see it happen. And that makes you
good, I think.

The most important thing about work¬
ing at Lion's Gate is the direction of
energy. You do not waste any energy
getting something to happen. You get to
devote your energy to what it is that is
happening. You don't have to worry
about putting it through so many filters
that by the time you get it back, it's not
really what you wanted. You're con¬
fronting the blank piece of paper right
here and given all the materials to draw
with.

My next project will probably not be
here, and I don't know if I will ever do
another one here; we haven't discussed
that. I would like to, and I think Bob
would like to have me back, but my next
project won't be here. I'm waiting to see
what happens. I've read a lot of scripts,
and I'm sure I'll read a lot more.

You'd really like to direct a script somebody
else has written?

I'd like to try that. But I haven't found
anything that I'm right for. I got involved
with a project and had to back out. I said,
"I'm the wrong person for this." I think
it's because, the way I do things, I have to
make it so much mine that there are cer¬
tain things I'm not interested in or that
aren't interested in me. I'm wrong for a
lot of things.

And yet, I do know I have a certain
viewpoint—and out of curiosity I'd like
to apply it to a variety of things and see
what it comes out like. And it always
seems to be dealing with making it a little
more weird. Like welcome to l.a. —it's
got this weird time-in-space feel to it.
Somebody said it was a Thirties romance
done in 1980.^

FILM COMMENT 13

CARRIE,AND

SALLY

AND

LEATHERFACE
AMONGTHE
FILM BUFFS

by Roger Greenspun

Leatherface and Sally in THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.

I

"...one can point out the backs of their
heads in the darkness..."

ne week last autumn Vincent
Canby devoted his regular New
York Times Sunday column to the
subject of movie violence. Canby follow¬
ers (I am one—and an admirer) could
easily enough have identified the piece
as the sort of thing he does when there
are no important new movies to re¬
review and when he can think of nothing
else to do and yet has to produce the
Sunday essay that is, I suspect, the least
agreeable and least meaningful part of
his job. Last autumn furnished a lot of
weeks with nothing else to do, and the
violence article is one that most movie
critics could write with both eyes closed
and their minds tied behind their
backs—and that some self-evidently do.
Canby's essay offered nothing extraor¬
dinary. But the reaction to it a few weeks
later in the paper's "Film Mailbag" cer¬
tainly did. There was an outpouring of
grateful and congratulatory letters de¬
ploring recent movie trends and, in the
words of Robert L. Dilenschneider of
New York City, thanking God for Vin¬
cent Canby's commentary on violence
and taking comfort "that good taste still
exists somewhere."

I don't know what it takes to uphold
good taste in the Sunday Times. I do
know something of what it takes to get

favorable letters, or any letters at all. My
theory has always been that if you were
Aristotle and published your Poetics in
the Arts and Leisure section, nobody
would notice. But if you wrote, say,
about the rudeness of Broadway box-
office personnel, you'd get some re¬
sponse. Hit the current decline of
values—any values—and the response
might grow to a torrent. If Canby had
taken a stand on something real in his es¬
say, the very same letter writers would
have either (a) fallen asleep over their
Sunday paper, or (b) proposed tearing
him limb from limb. Reader tolerance in
these matters tends toward the straight
and very narrow.

Outraged decency is the safest of all
editorial attitudes, and potentially one of
the dirtiest. For example, look at two ar¬
ticles that appeared last November, one
by Stephen Farber in New York maga¬
zine; the other by Stephen Koch in
Harper's. Farber cites Koch, more or less
approvingly, and he cites producers and
screenwriters and the obligatory social
scientist as well: "Psychologist Seymour
Feshbach contends, 'Many people today
feel powerless in controlling their lives.
That feeling of impotence makes them
susceptible to the substitute offered by
movies.'" There is much more of the
same. The arguments are utterly con¬
ventional, and so are the examples:
MARATHON MAN, THE OMEN, LIPSTICK,

WALKING TALL (that last example dumps
the good in with the garbage). And the
tone sustains a level of middle-brow
consternation that I associate more with
my high-school civics texts that with the
sophisticated anxieties of New York.
Farber does shoot off a few original
shockers (e.g. "The o±ily message Hol¬
lywood understands is the ring of the
cash register"), but generally he stands
firmly at the center of nowhere. "The es¬
calation of violence in films is troubling,
but there are no easy solutions"—like a
senator from a western pulpwood-
producing state trying to urge forest con¬
servation. I imagine that he isn't about to
knock the powers in cinema that turn out
most of the violent movies and coinci¬
dentally provide him with his copy, his
reason for writing.

But Stephen Koch suffers from no
such inhibitions, and his piece on vio¬
lence, "Fashions in Pornography: Mur¬
der as an expression of cinematic chic,"
leaps into battle with a fury that would
cheer the heart of any editor concerned
with the vigor of his writers' leads. Un¬
like Farber, Koch isn't surveying the
field. He knows the enemy: "The TEXAS
CHAIN SAW MASSACRE is a vile little piece
of sick crap which opened early in 1974 in
a nameless Times Square exploitation
house, there to be noticed only as
another symptom of the wet rot, another
step along the way."

14 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

He also knows the enemy's allies:
"...placed before its intended audience,
THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was a
complete failure. Unfortunately it did
not then proceed to die the death it de¬
served. At the last minute it was...res¬
cued by a certain branch of the film intel¬
ligentsia, who sent it sailing down the
high road to fame and fortune...

"The first phase was a sudden fashion
among the film buffs.... From the buffs,
the film was taken up by the Museum of
Modern Art... purchased for the
Museum's permanent collection... os¬
tentatiously screened in the 'Re/View'
program...through the museum's pres¬
tige., .pressed upon...Cannes, which
gave it a highly publicized screening....
In Cannes the film naturally enjoyed a
drearily predictable succes de scan-
dale... not long ago the two fine Texas
boys who concocted this puling little at¬
rocity found themselves in Hollywood
... signing no less than a five-picture
contract with Universal Studios."

I've left out most of the nasty asides in
that account of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW
MASSACRE caper, the way MOMA and
the film buffs combined to impose this
atrocity on an otherwise unwilling public
and eventually assure its exposure be¬
fore the jaded thrill seekers of Cannes,
thus rewarding its perpetrators with that
five-picture contract in Hollywood.
Merely correcting some errors in the
itinerary may be beside the point, but for
the record:

1. Upon its initial opening THE TEXAS
chain SAW MASSACRE was not a failure. It
was a modest success, primarily in the
drive-ins and local theaters around the
country, where it was originally re¬
leased.

2. MOMA did not purchase a print,
but rather had one contributed by the
distributor, Bryanston.

3. The film played at Cannes three
months before its screening in the Re¬
view program, so that Koch's implied
chain of causal relations is simply wrong.

Ostensibly Koch's piece is about the
success of a violent movie, and he does
actually devote one paragraph to an in¬
accurate description of the film ("Obese
gibbering castrati grasp snarling chain
saws as they chase and kill screaming
women..." though in fact just one
woman is killed and a different one
chased—she escapes—and the chain
saw killer—again, singular—may be
missing most of his teeth but not, from
anything the movie tells us, his sexual
organs). But mostly Koch writes about
the damnable conspiracy involving
low-budget filmmakers, MOMA, and
the whole dismal history of film-buff
taste. He tends to see buffs the way Joe
McCarthy used to see Communists, and
with, I suspect, the same disinterested
devotion to his cause.

The buffs now "...form a quite cohe¬

rent and by no means powerless sub¬
culture of the general intelligentsia....
the more advanced buffs have appropri¬
ated their own seats in the Museum of
Modern Art's screening room; one can
point out the backs of their heads in the
darkness... in recent times the buff has
sometimes surfaced into positions of
great influence... The French New Wave
...a coterie of buffs ... Cahiers du cinema
... canonical journal of buff taste ... The
American Film Institute ... is very much
under the influence of buff taste.

Buffery, in Koch's view, eschews
"serious cinema" and pretty much seri¬
ous anything: "down with Kafka, up
with Douglas Sirk," a rallying cry, I
gather, in the Plato's Cave of buffdom.
But you can safely remain unserious only
so long: "Eventually, even a refreshing
sentimentalism must become mere in¬
tellectual impotence. Trapped in vicari¬
ousness and passivity, committed to in¬
tensity rather than authenticity, to fan¬
tasy (in Coleridge's distinction) rather
than the imagination, the buff's sweet
sentimentalism eventually finds its out¬
come in pornography.

"There is a terrible logic to it...."

I'll say! Frankly I don't think there is
any logic to it at all. That incredible
coalition of Texans, museum curators,
Cannes sophisticates, the AFI, impotent
fantasists, and Douglas Sirk against seri¬
ousness, Kafka, Coleridge, and Koch ri¬
vals any attack on film intellectuals I
have seen since Dwight Macdonald
likened Andrew Sarris to the Creature
from the Black Lagoon way back in the
early Sixties, in the dear dead interesting
days of Film Quarterly.

The name "film buff" of course implies
its own form of insult. Nobody who buys
this magazine needs it explained that
reading Lamia half a dozen times puts
you on the way to being a Keats scholar,
whereas your sixth viewing of the man
WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE brands you a
buff, and unhealthy, and maybe even
one of the recognizable regulars at the
Museum of Modern Art.

In the pejorative sense, I think there
are no buffs. People who love old trolley
cars or model trains understand what
they love and why in ways not so much
less intelligent than people who love
string quartets or paintings, or than men
and women who love one another do. I
am not a movie buff to any particular de¬
gree, but I'll confess a buff's addiction to
ship models. For example. I've never
figured why my friends visiting Paris
rush off to the Chaillot Cinematheque ,
when they could be upstairs next door
losing themselves to the miniature
glories of the Musee de la Marine.

Koch has buffs for trash, TEXAS CHAIN
SAW MASSACRE, Douglas Sirk, and Jean
Harlow, and against art, Kafka, and the
"history of 'high' film taste from Eisen-
stein to, say, Bergman or Ozu." The op¬

position is nonsense. Harlow was a
major talent, not a fetish; Sirk has di¬
rected Shakespeare, Schiller, and
Moliere as well as TAZA, SON OF COCHISE;
and as for the history of film taste, how
do you suppose Yasujiro Ozu found his
way into the awareness of American
moviegoers, finally to percolate down to
the experience of people like Koch?
Whether the same will happen with
Tobe Hooper, who made THE TEXAS
CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, only time and that
"five-picture contract" will tell.

But if you want to learn how it all be¬
gins, take a look at a real buff rag, Annie
Laurie Starr , written by Barry Gillam of
Katonah Avenue in the Bronx and care¬
fully mimeographed by Moshe Feder.
Issue #6, June 1976, runs to twenty-four
packed pages, twelve of which Gillam
gives over to his personal—and
useful—observations on THE SEARCHERS.
The rest contains his acknowledgments
of, and answers to, letters from friends
and correspondents about anything
from DARLING LILI to STORY OF THE LAST
CHRYSANTHEMUMS (Blake Edwards and
Kenji Mizoguchi, for the benefit of non¬
buffs). One of the answers, to a
Wisconsin-based Annie Laurie Starr reg¬
ular, deals with THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW
MASSACRE, which Gillam admits he saw
only when MOMA ran it (you can almost
smell the conspiracy taking place) and
after a favorable review appeared, writ¬
ten by me. From MOMA to Greenspun
to Gillam; from West 53rd Street to
Katonah Avenue—a veritable snowball
of buffic tastemaking, gathering new in¬
fluence as it thunders onward, until it
lands, plop, in that five-picture deal with
Universal.

But if your mind, like mine, is too sim¬
ple to grasp the grand design; if you sim¬
ply read Gillam, you find some interest¬
ing insights into the movie and you'll
even learn a few things—that it was shot
in 16mm, that it was Tobe Hooper's sec¬
ond film, and that his third, presumably
the first of the five, deals with "a Texas
psychopath who feeds people to his pet
crocodile." There you have the seed of a
whole new crusade for Stephen Koch.

II

"My family has always been in meat."

G illam admires the movie but com¬
plains that if anything it is not too
gory, but too "artistic." He has a point.
From its very opening shots of disin¬
terred half-decomposed corpses
perched upon their tombstones under
the blazing Texas sun, THE TEXAS CHAIN
SAW MASSACRE never lets you forget that
its horror is also a crazy beauty. Since the
film's action, like its title, leaves little to
the imagination, it is free to develop im¬
ages. The bright sunflowers growing in a
white frame house's garden; the de¬
lightful porch swing that stands in its

FILM COMMENT 15

front yard; delicate mobiles of feathers
and bones, the end-products of Leath-
erface's chainsaw craftsmanship; the
homey gathering of grandpa and
grandma and their pet pooch in the up¬
stairs sitting room (grandma and the dog
have been dead for some years now, and
they are in an advanced state of decay);
the armchair where Sally wakes up, its
arms made of her late girlfriend's arms;
Sally's dimly-seen flight through the
misty darkness, with Leatherface's chain
saw roaring in the underbrush behind
her—all this has a feel almost of elegance
that doesn't belie but does distance the
extended scream that is primarily what
you hear on the film's sound track.

There's no point pretending that THE
TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE hides a secret
life in which it is something other than,
or "better" than, it means to be. It is
about five young Texans, two girls and
three boys, one of them confined to a
wheel chair, who come upon an all-male
household (fathers and sons) who
butcher people for their nutritional value
and for the thrill of it. One member, his
face gruesomely masked in leather, does
the killing. The others apparently do the
cooking, except for grandpa, now too far
gone to do more than suck an occasional
drop of blood. Three of the kids are killed
almost at once. The boy in the wheel
chair dies later. The girl named Sally
(Marilyn Burns) escapes, though only
after a night of unspeakable horror.

The problem—I mean this—is that
there seems to be nothing of interest
here. The film's solution is virtually to
embrace its material so as to force an
interest. Sometimes by jokes (the arm¬
chair; the remains of the old folk's dog);
sometimes by the camera's ingenuity
(the sustained innocence of everything
shot from the position of the front-yard
swing, for example); sometimes by a
grotesque and yet revelatory beauty—it
leads you into a relation to its subject that
is always more conciliating than you
could expect. Not more shocking. The
shocks may be assumed from the mo¬
ment you buy your movie ticket; there's
simply no point in trying to build on
them. But more intriguing—so that you
find yourself moving into the film's
world with a sense of pioneering fasci¬
nation that for the ninety minutes it lasts
all but shuts out the overwhelming in¬
congruity of your being there. It is ap¬
proximately the situation of Alice's Ad¬
ventures in Wonderland —for me, and I
guess for many, the most terrifying of all
stories.

Its progress is the progress of a night¬
mare. For this kind of movie, that sounds
ordinary enough, except that THE TEXAS
CHAIN SAW MASSACRE at some level seri¬
ously demonstrates it. It follows a rather
strict unity of time—less than one full
day— an d 0 f place and action, and it
makes stunning use of such decorum in

its final moments. Possibly the most
startling image of the movie is the sight
of the morning, daylight, after Sally
hurls herself out of the window of the
modest dining room that was to have
been her death chamber. You had for¬
gotten the dawn, and to rediscover it is
again to be confronted, almost against
your will, with larger necessities than
those governing the madman with his
chain saw. The white frame house turns
out to be within running distance of the
highway, and Sally makes her escape
behind a massive trailer truck (a livestock
transport, of course) that stops to help
her. Suddenly Leatherface, snarling saw
in hand, seems all but lost in the traffic. It
is the last phase in a shifting sequence of
points of view that began with our fixa¬
tion upon dead things, their hideous¬
ness and their fascination, and that ends,
without too much relief, in the pressures
of daily commerce.

I can fault the movie here and there
—mostly for its inexperienced acting,
just once or twice for some uncharac¬
teristic horror-film cheap shots—but I
can't deny its power, its humor, its can¬
niness, or the intelligence that calculated
its simple action. I don't think it "means"
anything at all, which ultimately limits
its appeal for me. But I do think it almost
always understands what it is looking at.
That's rare enough, and probably the
real source of its reputation among those
impotent but influential buffs of Stephen
Koch's imagination. THE TEXAS CHAIN
SAW massacre hasn't become a cult
movie the way some genuinely bad films
like THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD or EL
TOPO have. Its attractions are too preci¬
ous, too much a matter of visual appreci¬
ation to excite anyone's passionate af¬
fection. Its audiacity lies in accustoming
us—temporarily—to the charnel house,
not in what it tells us once we have been
there. It has the vision of its distinctive
sensibility, but it lacks a context in which
to place that vision beyond the ordinary
one of our day-to-day living. For its pur¬
poses, that is enough. But really to see
the world shaken on its axis, you'll have
to look elsewhere. Try CARRIE.

Ill

"After the blood come the boys!"

T HE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE has
none, but Brian De Palma's CARRIE
has almost all the attributes Koch would
like in his buff's ideal movie—including
an homage to the trashy past, since its
roots go back especially to the teen-
market monster madness of the late Fif¬
ties. It also has violence, and an uncom¬
monly powerful eroticism, and lots of
blood (the underside to its eroticism),
and God knows it has its fans. Some of
my college students saw it three times
within a month of its opening last fall.
But then a magazine editor I write for

CARRIE WHITE, HER RISE AND FALL. As wall¬
flower (top left), prom queen (top right), bug-eyed
creature of revenge (bottom left), and nightmare

(bottom right).

and greatly respect saw it four times with
undiminished enthusiasm, and he be¬
came an expert on all the minor charac¬
ter's motivations in a way that might put
De Palma and his screenwriter Lawrence
Cohen to shame. I don't know where De
Palma stands with the most serious film
people, and I can appreciate what could
have been their uneasiness with him
over the years. Recently my own uneasi¬
ness has diminished. The "serious" De
Palma, from SISTERS (or maybe even from
DIONYSUS IN 69) through CARRIE simply
begins to make too much sense to be
dismissed as the aberration of a dis¬
placed satirist. I'm not at all sure that he h
has ever stopped being a satirist, but his
satire now encompasses a cosmos
peopled with dupes and demons, and

16 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

nobody thinks it is a joke.\

That the girl, that shimmering vision
of innocent grace and hopeful sensuality
dancing her way to the apocalyptic
climax of CARRIE, is really first cousin to
the passion-seething reptile women of
our fevered adolescent Saturday after¬
noons doesn't tell the whole story about
the movie. But it's a start. You must rec¬
ognize a desirable monster when you see
one. That Keats scholar deep in Lamia
should be prepared for all this, because
De Palma continues the traditions of the
Romantic Agony. In SISTERS, or OBSES¬
SION, or now in CARRIE, he sees his
women double—divided (and multip¬
lied) by something powerfully ambigu¬
ous in their sexuality. The two sides of
Carrie, the side she longs for and the side

she can't avoid, come together in the
potential of her physical being. I can't
imagine feminists will care for this, but it
seems logical that an action beginning
with Carrie's first menstrual flow (itself
seen virtually as the result of her own
self-gratifying caresses) should climax in
an inferno of blood-becpme-fire. At its
crudest, the film's basic proposition
might go: "Make Carrie bloody and see
what happens." At a level slightly less
crude, it would be to prove that the
dreadful pronouncements of Carrie's
sex-obsessed God-crazed mother are
never wrong. She knows the devil when
she sees him. And she knows a young
girl's adolescence contains the potential
for the destruction of the world.

CARRIE develops its meaning (I'm as¬
suming that you know the film's story)
precisely along the hazy line where sen¬
timental psychology and supernatural
mumbo-jumbo meet. De Palma's pen¬
chant for overhead shots now makes
sense, because the threats to Carrie all
strike from above—beginning with the
lobbed volleyball she fails to return in the
pre-credit sequence (the camera essen¬
tially descends into the movie on that)
and ending with the marvelous implosion
that destroys Carrie's house, incinerates
her martyred mother, and sends the girl
herself down to her just rewards. Con¬
versely, Carrie's own strengths seem to
come from below, from between her legs
in the case of the flowing blood, from the
low associations of the film's significant
graffiti ("Carrie White eats shit." "Carrie
White burns in hell."), and from the un¬
hallowed ground under which finally
she doesn't rest. A lot of the film's effec¬
tiveness derives from the ways it uses or
upsets the forces of gravity and inertia,
and a lot of its authority derives from that
too. Carrie has a cosmology of sorts: a
heaven (the high-school prom, where
you can dance "Among the stars") and
of course a hell. It is like the presence and
the history of the two cities New Orleans
and Florence, that De Palma used in OB¬
SESSION, or like his reading of a man's life
in that film out of Dante and an aware¬
ness of architectural styles. Not an iron¬
clad program, but a lose range of refer¬
ence that is very clever and .that seems to
me the most Hitchcockian thing about
De Palma—more Hitchcockian than the
employment of a Bernard Herrmann
score or the appearance of a shower
scene that may (or may not) remind you
of PSYCHO.

If THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE takes
on the rationalized progress of a night¬
mare, CARRIE keeps turning dream into
nightmare by a process somewhat more
complex. The initial shower sequence,
the whole ironic progress of Carrie's late
blooming from school wallflower to
prom queen, the marvelous epilogue that
actually is dreamed by Carrie's would-
be benefactress—again and again these

subvert our expectations, only to show
that the subversion is part of a broader
perception of things that we should have
held all along. We actually do hold such
perception for the prom sequence, dur¬
ing which Carrie becomes angel before
she turns demon, and during which we
keep hoping for the best while surely
knowing that the worst is the only end in
view. The gauging of that sequence—
really the bulk of the movie—from Car¬
rie's first moonstruck response to
Tommy Ross's idiotic ecology poem
through her tentative and then magical
ascension to the glories of typical Ameri¬
can girlhood, through the concommitant
(and basically comic) plot against her by
the evil Chris and Billy, to her transfor¬
mation into a bug-eyed creature of re¬
venge; all that (and Sissy Spacek's per¬
formance accompanying it) may rank as
the most brilliant movie tour-de-force in
years. But it counts as something more
than a tour-de-force because it connects
to an order in which a young girl's
romantic aspirations become part of an
upward-wishing / downward-doomed
interchange that is the central dramatic
activity of the film.

In ambition, if not in concentration,
CARRIE is more violent and much
bloodier than THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MAS¬
SACRE. But both combine a vitality de¬
rived from their delight in horror with an
intelligence special to some individual
points of view. Neither signals a trend
(though CARRIE capitalizes a bit on THE
EXORCIST and JAWS) but both identify
possibly major talents. In the contest of
last fall's big openings, from THE FRONT
to NETWORK to THE VOYAGE OF THE
DAMNED, De Palma's film especially be¬
gins to look like one of the few recent
achievements in American movies. Both
films cater mainly to an audience who
know what they are seeing—not neces¬
sarily film buffs, whose attention tends
to lie elsewhere, but the remaining heirs
of the unsophisticated moviegoers in
Manny Farber's great "Underground
Movies," that seminal article which
twenty years ago celebrated all the vir¬
tues that Stephen Koch in his new article
wants to attack. We have no genres left
in which movies can be made unselfcon¬
sciously (De Palma and Hooper hardly
rank as innocents in their fields), but we
do have this one genre in which movies
still work over a spectrum of responses
and actually develop meaning through
the pleasures of scaring you out of your
wits. Critics like Koch seem to wish they
were always seeing ELVIRA MADIGAN or
THE SEVENTH SEAL— and perhaps some
day they always will be. Meanwhile
there is work for the unwashed others.
The buff hot-line tells me I've just missed
something special in a nameless Times
Square exploitation house. So will
MOMA please re-view VIGILANTE FORCE
and MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH? riy

FILM COMMENT 17

My ideal producer would probably last ten minutes in
Hollywood. He would reassemble as many members of
the old Arthur Freed unit as are still extant, and hand them
over to Vincente Minnelli along with the latest Broadway
musical hit. He would reclaim Sam Fuller and Budd Boet-
ticher from involuntary retirement. He would be able to
separate directorial talent from the schlock it is so often ex¬
pended on early in its career, recognizing right now, for
example, that Corman regulars George Armitage and Paul
Bartel are more talented than a Broadway and TV emigre
like Robert (MURDER BY DEATH) Moore, who lucked out
commercially on his first film with a Neil Simon script and
a top cast.

Obviously Dino De Laurentiis is not my ideal producer.
But even confining oneself to the parameters of current
Hollywood, he hardly seems one of the more courageous
ones around. He not only constricts himself to known
quantities to direct his films, but wants them to be quan¬
tities which have previously (and recently) directed the
same kind of films. Since shifting his operations to the
United States in 1972, he has never hired a first-time di¬
rector, and perhaps that's asking too much. But he has
also never permitted a director to make a budgetary or
generic jump, either. There is no equivalent in his career to
the chance Richard Zanuck and David Brown took with
Steven Spielberg on JAWS, the one Robert Evans took with
John Schlesinger on MARATHON MAN, the one William
Castle took with Roman Polanski on ROSEMARY'S BABY, the
one Philip D'Antoni took with William Friedkin on THE
FRENCH CONNECTION. I don't like most of these films, but
that's not the point; the point is that it took some courage
and analysis to assign those directors at those points in

their careers to those particular projects.

Instead, De Laurentiis has an inordinate fondness for
the faceless, impersonal hacks whom he can count on to be
on schedule and under budget: Michael Winner (DEATH
WISH, THE STONE KILLER), Michael Anderson (the forth¬
coming ORCA), Edward Dmytryk (ANZIO), Terence Young
(THE VALACHI papers). Otherwise, he's strictly a follower:
Sidney Lumet for SERPICO after somebody else proved
Lumet's commercial adeptness for the thriller with THE
ANDERSON TAPES; John Frankenheimer for BRINKS after his
apparent comeback (thanks to Robert Evans) with BLACK
SUNDAY; Frank Pierson for KING OF THE GYPSIES after
Streisand hired that unproven director for A STAR IS BORN.
All of the candidates to direct KING KONG had previously
directed $20 million-plus grossers, including the eventual
one assigned, John (THE TOWERING INFERNO) Guillermin.

I go into all this at such length because a producer's
relationship with directors would seem to be the natural
subject matter of an interview with a producer in this mag¬
azine. In the case of De Laurentiis, this seemed useless—
and proved so when Ingmar Bergman was thrown into my
face as the producer's current redeeming artistic value.
No: It was best to approach De Laurentiis as a financier and
showman—the best, maybe, in the film industry today.
KING KONG the movie seems to me at best a modest suc¬
cess; KING KONG the financial deal and KING KONG the
publicity campaign are clearly masterpieces. The interview
took place on December 15th at De Laurentiis' New York
offices in the Gulf + Western Building, a few days before
KING KONG opened and several more before the film's re¬
views turned out to be more mixed than they appeared to
be on that day.—S.B.

18 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

W ell, I have to say that you seem to be
right-at least commercially.
Everybody in the industry who sees
KING KONG does entertain the possibility that
it will outgross JAWS.

Jaws is $240 million, worldwide. I
don't know if there exists in history of
our business a movie that can gross $241
million to beat JAWS. We hope to beat
JAWS —because in many territories JAWS
forbidden to fourteem years children.
Now, in my opinion, for KONG we have
the same audience JAWS had plus the
children.

Was this what you had in mind from the
start? To "beat JAWS"?

No. I must say, in all honesty: When
we started KONG, what was our attitude?
"Let's bring back KONG. We're gonna do
business; we're gonna make money.
Let's try to make a picture $7-8 million."
We never think about JAWS, about any¬
thing like that. Then, when we make the
budget: Oh my God! Then, when I start
to see the picture can be quality, not only
commercial but quality too—we can
make happy the audience in the street
and you [points to inerviewer ]—then I say:
We ought to do some sequences in spe¬
cial way, we ought to spend more. We
decided to go to twenty-four. At this
point, I begin to think: Maybe we have
possibility to make boxoffice look like
JAWS. Then I speak of JAWS.

It seems to me that you made a basic
decision-and the correctness or incorrectness
of this decision will determine if you outgross
jaws. You made the character King Kong the
victim totally. The audience never screams in
fear of Kong.

Yes!

It is not a scary movie.

Correct! This is the difference between
the old one and the new one. We decide
to go in different way from the old
movie. Let's have new angle: This we
decide in the script. Kong very simpatico,
and let's make a love story. When we
built Kong, we spent three million dol¬
lars. Why? Because when we built the
first Kong, it looked like PLANET OF THE
APES. I say I no like—let's start again.
When we built the second one it look like
a gorilla. I say I no likel Let's start againl
Because he's our leading man—our
leading character in the movie. They say,
"Mr. Dino, what you want?" I say, "The
face of Kong must be charming, sim¬
patico, and not look to any gorillas or any
apes. Must look completely friendly to
everyone." Then [Kong engineer-
constructor Carlo] Rambaldi did what I
like. You're only scared with Kong first
time he come in. In the second sequence,
when he start play with girl, the audi¬
ence realize Kong is nice guy.

And you don't think this will prevent it
from making a stratospheric amount of
money?

Is possible. We can't predict the audi¬
ence. But I no believe the people go see

movie because it's scary or not. The
people just want a big entertainment.
And in my opinion, if you try to make
KONG like JAWS or any other movie—is
already wrong. Give something new to
the audience. JAWS was scary. This is
simpatico character, touching everybody,
especially the women. Because women
strongly believe in'77 not just anymore
man ready to die for the first girl! And
Kong ready to die!

I don't want to go over the mechanics of the
special effects and of the Kong character-
they've been exhaustively covered
elsewhere-but I remember a big controversy
when you started. Black actors claimed that
you were looking for an "ape-like black" to be
inside an ape suit.

This is completely wrong information
from the press. We don't interview only
black. When we start to need man in the
suit, we see black guy, white guy, yellow
guy—because we don't need the face;
the face come black or yellow or red. We
need somebody like Marcel Marceau:
Mimo! Mimo! We need just some special
attitude in move like an ape. You under¬
stand that?

Was there ever a debate as to whether to
keep KONG in period?

Yeah, we had long long discussion
with [scriptwriter] Lorenzo Semple for
one month only about the "period or
modern?" And I said to Lorenzo,
"There's no way to make it in period. Be¬
cause when old one was made, it was

made in 1932, and for 1932 it was modern
movie. Now why we have to make same
movie and come back into period to
1932?"

I'll answer that.

Yeah?

Because in 1932 it was still common for
professional explorers to find strange things
in remote areas of the world and "bring 'em
back alive" to civilization. There's no need
now. You'd just send in the television
cameras and show it on "Wild Kingdom."

Well, you could bring Kong back if you
have a crazy character like Grodin, be¬
cause he goes to the island to bring back
oil and then he flop with the oil situation
and so instead he bring back Kong.

But first you have to make him a
geologist-because that kind of explorer
doesn't really exist anymore-and then you
ask us to accept that, on his own, he would
suddenly decide, "I'm the vice-president of
public relations," and bring back Kong as an
advertising symbol.

Is too much logical explanation. Movie
no need logical explanation! Everything
need not be true psychologically. The
true is what look like true. If we make
Kong not real, then you are right. Look at
the sequence in the supertanker—so
beautiful, one of the best sequences in
whole movie.

I almost think it's the best sequence.

Ah! You see? Now you have reason to
bring Kong to New York—to make just
this sequence!

FILM COMMENT 19

H ow did you go about deciding who
should direct KING KONG?

Very simple. The first guy I ask was
Steven Spielberg. Then Milos Forman,
then Polanski, Sydney Pollack—
everybody was worried about to do a
remake from a classic movie. So then I
decided to go with Guillermin, because
to me John Guillermin is a talent guy. He
is a strange character, but this don't
mean anything to me. All directors are
strange characters. Bergman is a strange
character, Fellini is a strange
character—all directors. He was very
open to special effects. And then, he be¬
lieve in the story; he believe in the love
story. And if he believe in it, it works.
Because John Guillermin believe in this
fantastically human love story.

But in going to Guillermin as opposed to
those other people, you were going with
somebody with a reputation as a technician
rather than somebody who makes the kind of
film which the critics like and which wins
awards.

Well, you know, every director at one
point jump from one category to another
category. No director can be genius from
first movie. You must give a chance
when people are talented. And I recog¬
nize in John some quality. And he did it
with KONG. He surprised you, surprised
all critics. We have smashing reviews
from [ Los Angeles Times critic Charles]
Champlin—he says KING KONG number
two better than number one. Variety.
Hollywood Reporter. Fantastic reviews.

Do you think it has a chance for the Best
Picture Oscar?

For the nomination, I think so. It win?
We have to see the other competition.
You know, my dear friend, you must
recognize: Is more difficult for everyone
to make good movie with KING KONG
than with ROCKY or BOUND FOR GLORY or
NETWORK. Star is born —is more easy to
do it, because you have Barbra
Streisand, she have great personality.
Taxi driver —we have two good people
like Scorsese and DeNiro. Is more dif¬
ficult to convince you that KONG is a good
movie than it would be for any other
movie. Here we have practically well-
unknown director because nobody
know really John quality—and big ape.
And all unknown people around him.
For the fact that when you're believing in
apes, you already start losing quality
with people like you. And if I convince
Champlin one hundred percent. Variety
one hundred percent, you fifty or
seventy-five percent—it's not easy. Be¬
cause it's a big head ; they have to act with
big head.

Was it ever considered going with big
stars?

No, you need one big star in movie.
We have Kong. Jeff Bridges is well-
known, very good actor. Grodin was
brought in because in my opinion Gro¬
din some movie symbol of some execu¬

tives in the American industry now, with
mentality, "Everything has to be done
with promotion, publicity." You know
what I mean? And we try to make realis¬
tic. From the other hand: Why we have
this Grodin with funny line? If you see
the picture with the audience, you'd be
surprised how many laughs we have
with Grodin. Because—this was my
attitude—you must make Kong real,
serious, but around him you must have
some humor. In 1977, you cannot have
KING KONG 100 percent straight, serious.
It's impossible. You must play around
him in some way.

Has any movie besides CLEOPATRA cost
more than $24 million?

I don't think so. And it's certainly the
most expensive movie made in history in
the most short time. We start January 15;
in ten months we finish the movie, we're
ready for release in the most big open¬
ings in the history of the industry—2,200
cinema worldwide—with Italian version
ready, French version ready, German
version ready, Spanish version ready,
Japanese version ready. No studio can do
it. I guarantee you. No studio in the
United States are capable to do this
opening: finish the picture November 15
and on same day five dubbed versions
ready. No studio. One-man operation,
yes. But no one studio. I make any bet.

It's different approach. Because major
usually starts the publicity campaign
when the picture is finished. The people
sit down in the screening room, see the
picture, then the next day sit down to de¬
cide what is to be done. Because the

major believes the most of publicity must
be five, six, seven weeks before the pic¬
ture opens. I disagree completely entirely.
Promotion in my opinion must start
when the picture start shooting.

So you would think Francis Ford Coppola
is being stupid with apocalypse now? No
publicity during production, etc.

Well, I don't know. Coppola I respect
as one of the best directors we have in the
world, especially in the United States. I
have no idea why he wants no publicity.
If I was producer,I guarantee you I start
the publicity eight months ago. But
Coppola's seems to be the policy of all
American people. I disagree for a very
simple reason: The States we have 250
million people. You cannot reach big
mass of 250 million people in four weeks.
It's too great to believe. Better to go little
by little, little by little. . .

But you're only talking about the kind of
picture which has elements in it which are
publicizable from the beginning, aren't you?

Well, of course, what I'm talking about
can only be done with a special movie.
Apocalypse is one of these movies
where it could be done. You have big
personalities—Coppola, Brando. A spe¬
cial story—the first big movie about
Vietnam. Reason enough to start public¬
ity eight months ago.

I n your method of operation, you don't get
your financing from a major who takes on
worldwide distribution in exchange. Rather,
you get advances against receipts from local
distributors in each country, sometimes in-

BOB & BARBRA &

BRUCE & BERGMAN

THE ALTMAN RAG

Both sides of the RAGTIME controversy —
your firing of Robert Altman in favor of
Milos Forman as director of your forth¬
coming production of the book—have been
amply aired in the press, but there's one
question that sticks in my mind. Did you
buy the property and then assign it to
Altman, or did he bring it to you?

No. I buy the property when all
major studio refuse to buy it. And
when it was not published, when it was
not big best-seller, when it was just
manuscript. And I buy. And then I give
it to Bob Altman to read.

THIS YEAR'S STAR'S BEEN BORN

Last year New York magazine reported
you as interviewing Bruce Springsteen to
star in your forthcoming production of
Peter Maas's king of the gypsies. Now
you've assigned Frank R. Pierson, of A
STAR IS BORN, to write and direct. What's
happened to the Springsteen idea?

Well, it's still possibility. But I like
better Stallone, I must say.

BLACK WIDOW

Why didn't Streisand want to do THE
MERRY WIDOW for you and Ingmar
Bergman?

No. Streisand want to do it!

What? She did? Every report has said
the opposite.

She called—[agent] Sue Mengers
called all the time—she want to do it.
But Bergman want to go with some¬
body else. Very simple.

When Bergman came to Los Angeles
right after he left Sweden, there was a report
in the press. Bergman said, "Dino has a
marvelous casting idea for MERRY
WIDOW," but he wouldn't say what it is.
Can you say what it is?

Yeah. The marvelous idea is to use
black girl.

Diana Ross?

We don't mention name. The idea for
cast is to go with complete new differ¬
ent approach. Black girl. It can be lo¬
cated in Martinique. The story—the
"widow" go from Martinique to Spain.
For Bergman, was very exciting idea.
But we don't mention any name.

Do you think it will be his next film?

Oh, sure. But we don't know with
who.

20 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1977

eluding majors who are taking the film only
for one or two countries. The question is: Are
you a producer , or are you a studio head?

I believe only one-man operation in
the industry. I believe like when in 1930
the American industry was great in the
world, when men like Darryl Zanuck,
Zukor, Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, etc.,
make really the American industry, was
one-man operation. And I still believe
today the only way to go—one-man op¬
eration. Now: If I am studio, or if I am
producer, I leave for you to decide. But
my answer is: I am one-man operation.

But you're involved in so many pictures at
once that it must vary from film to film. It
seems to me that a guy like Martin Bregman,
who got the actual producer credit on
serpico— a so-called "Dino De Laurentiis
Production"—had more responsibility than
anybody but you yourself had on KING KONG,
where you're actually called the producer.

But on SERPICO, I choose the story, I
read only ten page before the book is
finish, and I decide to buy. Then, true, I
put Bregman in charge to produce the
movie. But was I just studio head?
Would any studio decide to buy book for
half a million dollars by reading ten
page? I don't think any studio is in posi¬
tion to do that. No one. Because if head
of the studio go into board and say, "I
read ten page from the book that will be
500 page, and I want to buy for
$500,000," the board say, "Please, you
would resign from now on?"

But one thing is the billing in the
United States. I buy story DEATH WISH
from two producer—I don't remember
the name. I never saw these two guyf
They never came into production, never

do anything, but when I buy book from
them, one of the obligations was pro¬
ducer credit. So I gave them producer
credit; the billing was "produced by."
Because everybody in United States be¬
come crazy about billing. I don't give a
shit who has the credit, the billing, re¬
ally.

Well, for KING KONG maybe it's a little
different because you have to psycho¬
logically understand: $24 million is tre¬
mendous gamble, is different from pic¬
ture cost four. If I give up something
about picture cost four, I don't give up
anything for picture costing twenty-
four.

Do any of these distributors ever exercise
any creative control, or veto power? Can they
bow out if the elements change, or. . .

No! Nobody decide anything. I just
say, "I'm making BRINKS, probably di¬
rected by John Frankenheimer. I want X
dollars from Germany." That's all.
Finished. He just take my picture. He
trust me. He want Dino De Laurentiis
movie. I don't give a damn about my
distributors. I just give my name and the
title of the movie. And then I make
change, I make cast, I make starring the
way I want. I don't need approval from
anyone. Look now. I make Bergman's
SERPENT'S EGG. Four million dollars pro¬
duction cost. When you add overhead,
and interest, and producer's fee, you
have more like five million dollars. When
Richard Harris get sick and we substitute
David Carradine, we don't need ap¬
proval from anyone, because I want
Bergman to make movie the way he
wants.

When I start KING KONG, with original

budget $16 million, no major want to be
involved as United States distributor, in¬
cluding Paramount. I start picture any¬
way. I don't need approval of anyone,
because if I want I make picture with my
own money—or money I loan from
banks—like I did with THE BIBLE. I spent
$17 million in 1962 without asking any¬
one what to do with it, and at end of
picture I make deal with Fox.

When Dimitri de Grunwald made
SHALAKO, the Sean Connery-Brigitte Bardot
western, that way several years back-with
advances from individual countries- The
New York Times had a story in its financial
section which showed that de Grunwald had
a profit before the picture even opened. The
individual distributors could lose money if the
picture failed in any one of their countries-
but de Grunwald was home free.

It's possible.

Has that ever happened to you? What is
your breakeven on KING KONG ?

Fifty million dollars. Yes, we already
have that in; from Paramount alone we
have $25 million minimum guarantee for
the American distribution. We're at
breakeven before we open. But KING
KONG special case. You know, I work
with these people from forty years and I
don't charge too much. I charge what is
necessary to charge. Is insane to try to
have a profit before and then your
people lose money. I don't want my
people to lose money. Why? Because
when I call next year, and say, "I have
four pictures this year. I want $2 million
from Germany, or from Italy," it's done.
Because these people know me for years,
years, years—I cannot make this kind of
a joke.

It's well-known that you've received some
lucrative offers to sell out to a big company.

I already receive proposition from one
conglomerate—I cannot tell you the
name—to buy my company. If I sell the
company. I cannot make movie. I cannot
work with anybody control. I can listen
to everyone, sure—but. . .

Well, I worked for Joe Levine in
1966-67. . .

He's a great man.

. . . and he also, at that time, didn't want
to accept any offers to sell out. But when, a
year later, he had THE graduate, the profit
was so large that he had no choice but to sell
Embassy Pictures to Avco. Because the
American tax system taxes capital gains at
half the rate it taxes profits, he just had to
convert a profit into a capital gain. If KING
KONG is as big as JAWS, might that not hap¬
pen to you? Won't your lawyers come to you
and say, "If you don't sell, it's $20 million
more in taxes you have to pay"?

Well, if it's that profitable. . . .

Maybe you could pull off the ideal. Not
even Joe Levine could do it. You sell to a con¬
glomerate, but without a contract for your
personal services. Then you form a new com¬
pany!

Everything's possible A : C

FILM COMMENT 21

MOMA/FILM STILLS

A lmost everyone pays taxes, and
more than half a million are in the
fifty-percent tax bracket or above.
But for this elite, explicitly allowed de¬
ductions are not the last resort; there are
loopholes. And what's a loophole after
all? A court decision, an IRS regulation, a
phrase in a statute refracted through a
gem owned by an optimist and looped
by a lawyer with absolute acuity.

Until recently a person with a high
taxable income could put a dollar into
motion picture production or acquisition
and buy for himself at the same time two,
three, four, or even more dollars in tax
deferrals. That made movies into popu¬
lar tax shelters. The announcement last

form bill restricting shelter provisions for
the film industry. Now that the bill has
been signed by President Ford, that viv¬
ifying tide of fugitive dollars will con¬
tract.

In recent years high interest rates have
constricted traditional money sources,
like bank credit; and more and more pic¬
tures have been involved in "outside
financing situations." The budgets of
more than half the total films in produc¬
tion, completed, or released in 1975 by
Columbia, Warner Brothers, Para¬
mount, United Artists, American Inter¬
national Pictures, and Allied Artists con¬
tained some tax sheltered money—a total
of $39,000,000. Hollywood requires out-

sorbing its losses (swashbuckler and
gable and lombard) and riding its gains
(the sting and jaws), winners paying
for losers. Disney does the same. Fox
and United Artists have done barely a
dozen shelter deals between them and
do not need shelters to survive. UA's
biggest picture of all time, one flew over
the cuckoo's nest, was not a shelter
deal, nor were Fox's young Franken¬
stein, silent movie, and the omen.
Warners' policy has been to negotiate
with outsiders for cash only to subsidize
marginal films like the prisoner of sec -
ond avenue, which it produced, or
hearts and minds, which it picked up
for distribution.

* H€HER SHGLO *

Now Do We Write Off Hollywood?
by Mitch Tuchman

year that the House Ways and Means
Committee intended to curtail tax defer¬
ral schemes cast a chilling specter upon
the screen: a vision of plutocrats adrift
without shelter, the flow of millions of
"outside dollars" into Hollywood stem¬
med. The output of American pictures
declined, in anticipation of unfavorable
action by Congress. Then, in September,
the House and Senate passed a tax re¬

side capital if 18,000 American and
Canadian theaters are going to have pic¬
tures to show. With shelters eliminated,
the flow of films will contract.

Major manufacturers would dispense
with outside financing if they could: the
price of sharing financial risks is sharing
profits. For that reason Universal stub¬
bornly finances its operation internally,
and through traditional bank loans, ab-

But all in Hollywood will not weather
the storm so easily. The smaller and less
financially able distributors—AIP, Al¬
lied, and Columbia—will suffer. And the
independent producers will suffer most
of ah.

AIP, known for its teen movies, horror
fantasies, and black exploitation thril¬
lers, has lately attempted a change of im¬
age, mounting bigger productions with

22 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1977

shelter dollars, pictures like future-
world and a matter of time. AIP may
now be forced to return to the business it
was in before.

Allied Artists—a marginal producer
with a typical, annual, pre-shelter pro¬
duction budget of $4,000,000—spent
$12,000,000 on tax-sheltered films in the
first six months of 1975 alone. But since
September 1975, Allied's ability to attract
investors has been severely limited. The
one picture completed since then, the
next man, was based on the kind of shel¬
ter deal that now is disallowed.

For Columbia Pictures, where shelter
money once offered a second chance at
life itself, things look bad indeed. In six
years (1958, 1959, 1961, 1971, 1972, and
1973), Columbia had losses to equal the
combined profits of its other forty-four
years in the picture business. To con¬
tinue in production Columbia needed
$45,000,000, only $20,000,000 of which
they had. In October 1973 the first shelter
deal was concluded. The extra dollars
were used to back more, rather than big¬
ger, independent pictures like the last
detail and for pete's sake. Ninety per¬
cent of the aggregate production budget
of Columbia was accounted for by deals
financed by some shelter money. Out¬
side participation meant that Columbia
was relinquishing a considerable share
of the box office gross; yet the bank debt
was reduced from $220,000,000 to
$100,000,000, helped by the company's
sale of radio and TV stations and other
subsidiaries; and the giveaways Colum¬
bia was forced to concede in succeeding
deals diminished. Without shelters, Co¬
lumbia will continue backing indepen¬
dent productions by going abroad or re¬
lying more heavily on internal funds.

H ow did this situation arise? Tight
money was less a cause than a
catalyst: the "outside financing situa¬
tion" is largely a result of the 1946 Su¬
preme Court antitrust decision—which
led to the "consent decree" among the
major studios that split motion picture
production and distribution from exhibi¬
tion. Block booking practices (by which
studios compelled theaters to buy
B-pictures at fixed rentals to run with top
product) were ended. Once the govern¬
ment made the studios sell each picture
on its own merits, and the studios no
longer owned theaters, a sellers' market
became a buyers' market—with TV co¬
opting the B-film—the sellers no longer
dared gamble on producing any but class
product. They released their contract
players and technical personnel and re¬
duced their production schedules. As
Ninotchka said of Stalinism, "The
purges were a great success. There will
be fewer but better Russians." Up came
the agencies, the packagers, the deal-
makers wanting in for their clients and
themselves on the fewer but better pic¬

tures to be studio-made.

Born were the "independent" produc¬
tion companies, corporate skeletons
with no assets save a star or star director
or producer with a hot property. The film
producer was now an "independent
producer." But what was this so-called
independence when the pivotal function
in the production-distribution-exhibi¬
tion chain was, and still is, unquestiona¬
bly distribution, linking pictures with
theaters? It was the studio salesmen who
knew the territory, who had been on
drinking terms with some exhibitor in St.
Louis for thirty years.

Production loans were advanced
against the high credit rating of the dis¬
tributor, who had guaranteed to release
an independent production. This meant
that the producer was not so much man¬
ufacturing a product as packaging the
elements with the distributor's approval,
functioning as a kind of shop super¬
intendent once the loan was approved.

Today, when about half of all pictures
released by studios are independent
productions, producers without finan¬
cing of their own find themselves com¬
peting for studio funds that are precious,
yet not altogether desirable. A look at a
Warner Brothers Standard Distribution
Agreement (the starting point for indi¬
vidual contract negotiations) tells why.
Warners has approval of cast, crew,
bank, script, locations, labs, music, start
date, contracts, screen credits, and ads.
Warners may view rushes, reproduce
work prints, recut or reshoot the finished
film. Warners takes precedence in all
matters save "the epidemic outbreak of
plague" and "acts of God." If costs go
five percent over budget or photography
five days over schedule, Warners can as¬
sume control of production, replace the
producer and director, or terminate the
project. Before the producer gets his
share of net proceeds, Warners deducts
from gross rentals the cost of distribu¬
tion, prints, ads, titles, press, conversion
of foreign currencies, copyrighting, dues
to the Motion Picture Association and
the Academy, residuals, and insurance.
"The term 'territory' as used in this
Agreement shall mean the entire uni¬
verse."

Rare is the producer who manages to
keep himself financially independent. If
he can see himself through development
of the script without "front money," if he
can get through packaging stars and
crew without becoming beholden to a
studio, and then through synching, edit¬
ing, mixing, and titling, so much the bet¬
ter for him. One good, solid block of out¬
side finance can make all the difference;
he can avoid giving away too many
chunks of the action just to get the thing
made. Should the film become that one
in seven that eventually makes a profit,
at least he will be left with a percentage.

Assuming, however, he has remained

aloof, the finished film must still get into
theaters. As producers have changed, so
have distributors. They are no longer
kings of the nepotes of other lots or even
entrepreneurs, but negotiators, the first
generation of studio leaders to be wholly
trained in the post-consent-decree era of
intricate deal-making and commercial
packaging. Into these perilous, shark-
infested waters of studio officialdom
comes the producer.

He takes his package, or his completed
film, to the major distributors. They love
it. They offer cash up front, or (less
favorably) a percentage of the gross in¬
come, or (still less favorably, and more
commonly) a percentage of the net prof¬
its after recoupment of negative cost, dis¬
tribution, prints, and ads. Or they hate
it.

He goes to the "major minors," com¬
panies like AIP and Avco Embassy, and
sometime during the screening a cherub
munching a stogie grumbles, "So? So
where's the hook in this piece of shit?"
The "minor minors," like New World or
Crown International, make crummy of¬
fers. The labs and creditors are on his
tail. By this time he would take a nickel
on the dollar.

O ne, good solid block of outside fi¬
nance. The movies do not have the
long Broadway tradition of the "angel."
Of course there were always Texans—
some from Texas, some not—with their
eager dollars. "Pecos flyers" (like
"mishbuchah money") were a straight
equity deal, hard cash in exchange for
percentages and perhaps a part for a
former Miss Longhorn, who had lines
but couldn't necessarily speak them.

Tax shelters provided that block of
outside finance. The way was paved by a
Supreme Court decision, the Crane
Case, in 1947. Jack O'Connell's christa
(1969, released by AIP in 1971 as Swedish
fly girls), was the first film financed by
a tax shelter. But full import of the Crane
decision was not realized until 1972,
when tax shelters were screen-tested,
found amenable to the medium, and in¬
stantly groomed for greatness.

Essentially, the Supreme Court de¬
cided that a taxpayer's cost in acquiring a
property is the cash he puts down from
his own resources plus the loan which
makes up the remainder of the purchase
price. It is this total cost, cash plus loan,
that becomes the basis on which the tax
consequences of the deal are calculated
for the individual. If his own cash contri¬
bution were $100,000, and he borrowed
another $200,000, the investment would
be said to have been "leveraged" two-
to-one, two of the lender's dollars to
each one of the investor's.

Groups of people as well as individu¬
als can leverage investments. A limited
partnership—a group of investors, each
with some cash of his own in the kitty—

FILM COMMENT 23

can negotiate a loan collectively. Then
the tax basis for the profits and liabilities
of the business of the partnership is allo¬
cated to each partner according to his
proportioniate contribution to the kitty.
If the debt is shared, the leverage is
shared. If all together the partners
pooled $1,000,000 cash and borrowed
another $2,000,000, each partner has
leveraged his proportionate share of the
original $1,000,000 two-to-one. No one
partner has taken responsibility for the
full $2,000,000 loan.

So here's the hook, as the man with
the stogie might say: in the case of most
institutional lending on property, no one
is personally responsible for repayment.
The lender, said to be "without re¬
course," looks to the proceeds of the in¬
vestment, e.g. the gross rentals on the
film, for repayment of the loan. So if a tax
shelter group simply adds non-recourse
debt to its cost in a motion picture trans¬
action, it successfully and legally inflates
its tax basis. Then if there is a loss from
the investment, each partner gets to de¬
duct his share of the loss from his other
earned income—from tonsilectomies, let
us say.

What keeps a partnership from
pooling $1,000,000 and borrowing
$50,000,000? Supposedly, the IRS would
not countenance such a transparent at¬
tempt to create "tax losses." Modest
leveraging, on the other hand, is as¬
sumed to represent a legitimate incen¬
tive to invest in America. Meanwhile,
the investor can use his money for the
five or ten years before it begins to be
taxed. If he merely puts it in the bank for
ten years at ordinary interest, he doubles
his money and thus makes up for the tax.
It's what Gore Vidal calls socialism for
the rich.

I n this atmosphere of high capitalism
and high stakes a new kind of Hol¬
lywood professional developed: money
finder for the independent filmmaker,
film finder for the independently
wealthy. For the investor, the sheer risk
is an attraction, and although his contact
with the film world is hardly more than a
flirtation, he can boast to his associates of
a deal he's got brewing in the cinema.
But it is the new intermediaries who
meet the producers and make the deals.

Burton W. Kanter of Chicago epito¬
mizes the new Hollywood. He is not a
filmmaker. He is a lawyer, a tax special¬
ist, and his firm's involvement in the pic¬
ture industry comprises less than three
per cent of its business. Kanter repre¬
sents the apex of the new pantheon. It
was he who brought together those
loopholes which had been the basis for
shelters in apartment building syndica¬
tions, low-rent housing, cattle feed lots,
walnut and avocado groves, and equip¬
ment leasing. It was he who found their
special application to films in plans

which have made available more than
$100,000,000 in production funds for
films since his first, perhaps too aptly en¬
titled payday, for which he assembled
financing in 1972.

The deals have become more imagina¬
tive since then. One tax group, Persky-
Bright/Devon, utilizing various shelter
strategies to produce or acquire motion
pictures, assembled a mammoth pack¬
age of films that included the man who

WOULD BE KING, TAXI DRIVER, THE FRONT,
THE MISSOURI BREAKS, GATOR, HARRY AND
WALTER GO TO NEW YORK, THE ENTER¬
TAINER (a movie for television), sinbad

AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER, and FROM

noon till three. More than twenty-five
investors bought units that cost in excess
of $150,000 each. Each unit brought in
more than $400,000 in tax deferrals.

That is all history now. Persky-Bright
has done nothing since September 1975
when stirring of tax reform began. The
entire Persky-Bright/Devon deal was
concluded prior to that. Even so, the IRS,
reportedly investigating the deal, may
disallow the shelters.

hat has Congress done?

The tax reform bill, whose pro¬
visions will be effective retroactively to
September 10, 1975, reverses the shelter
consequences of the Crane Case: a tax¬
payer's deduction will be limited to his
cash "at risk" in any particular invest¬
ment he makes. That wipes out the use
of borrowed funds for leverage. The
dollar-for-dollar, "at risk" losses that are
individually taken may be deducted
from any earned income, but the deduc¬
tions must be spread over the entire life
of the investment. If a film, for example,
earns money for five years, from foreign
and domestic theatrical rentals, from sale
to television, etc., the deductions must
be spread over five years. The genius of
Kanter's plan had been that the entire
cost was deducted from the personal in¬
come of each partner in the first year, the
year of production, as an ordinary busi¬
ness expense.

The Joint Committee on Internal Rev¬
enue Taxation, which hammered out the
new bill, deplored evidence of leverages
on films as high as twenty-to-one, and
the overstated values importers attached
to spaghetti westerns they hoped to
amortize as bad debts. Congress was
unmoved by the argument that shelters
represent de facto government subsidies
for the picture business in America, the
only major picture-making country not
to provide them.

Yet subsidy is the only excuse for shel¬
ters. Congress applied the "at risk" rule
in all shelter areas except real estate,
where an effective lobby painted a par¬
ticularly bleak employment picture. Un¬
employment was the keynote of Hol¬
lywood's lobbying effort, too. Burt Mar¬
cus, then Columbia's executive vice pres¬

ident and shelter expert, organized the
film industry's presentation to the
Committee. Appearing with him were
representatives of motion picture labor
organizations. Unemployment, they
stated, runs as high as ninety percent in
some Hollywood locals; curtailing pro¬
duction will surely exacerbate jobless¬
ness and reduce the federal income taxes
paid on wages, which represent two-
thirds of each production dollar, not to
mention taxes paid on the wages of thea¬
ter employees across the country.

They argued as if the rich were the
benefactors of the working class. The ra¬
tionalization that shelters at the "top"
produce taxable income at the "bottom"
simply justifies the endless concentra¬
tion of capital. Why was organized labor
supporting Marcus's interpretation,
perpetrating blackmail, threatening the
government with the loss of workers'
taxes if it refused to accede to the de¬
mand of the rich for shelter?

A number of hypotheses have been
advanced by Kanter, Bright, Allied Art¬
ists' Peter Strauss, and others to explain
why Marcus's strategy failed: Congress
neither knows nor cares about the mo¬
tion picture business; the majority of
studios that do not depend on shelters
were more interested in an "out-of¬
court-settlement" whereby tax shelters
would be allowed to wither while the
temporary ten percent tax credit on pro¬
duction dollars, available in other indus¬
tries, would be made permanent and ex¬
tended to the film industry. (Universal,
Warners, Fox, and Disney have hun¬
dreds of millions of dollars in claims
pending on that score.) So goes the ex¬
planation of Marcus's inability to get the
unequivocal support of the Motion Pic¬
ture Association.

What are the alternatives now? Ger¬
man tax shelters looked bright for a
while. "The one-to-one 'at risk' deduc¬
tion may prove competitive with other
dollar-for-dollar shelters," says Kanter.
"Oil, for instance, is risky, but there is
the depletion allowance. Movies are
risky, too, but the income is faster. The
new rules do not affect corporations, so
producers may look there for shelter
money. Distributors may go into the
public market . . . although the market
you then draw from are not the people
who can afford to lose."

Movies will unquestionably lose some
of their lay investors. The flow of pic¬
tures will diminish still further. More
films will be made abroad. Fewer films
will be made by independents.

Tax funding may have been the ulti¬
mate legacy of a filmmaking set-up
where packagers and legal counsel pre¬
dominate, and not a single tyrant
reigns—where only the grand old
stogie-muncher, looking for the hook in
a piece of shit, has the shameless convic¬
tion of his own lousy taste .V*

24 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

3XSAM:

Samuel Fuller interviewed
by Richard Thompson

Samuel Fuller, police reporter for the New York Evening Graphic at age 17

Widely respected in Europe, Sam Fuller's work has pro¬
ven a handy example in arguments about auteur practice.
He is a one-man writer/producer/director package in the
classical (and rare) auteur world. He is also one of a hand¬
ful of directors who work at the extremes of traditional
American cinema as opposed to bathing in its mainstream.

In his early sixties. Fuller is a small, energetic, loqua¬
cious, irreverent man who smokes seven cigars a day and
writes as many complete screenplays every year. He does
not do treatments or outlines. Two or three hundred of
these screenplays line the walls of his study. Fuller has
been married to actress Christa Lang (alphaville; dead
pigeon on beethoven street) for ten years. Their first
child, Samantha, is nearly two. Christa and Samantha
played Bruno Hauptmann's wife and daughter in a recent
TV dramatization of the Lindbergh kidnapping. During
one of our interviews, as Fuller dramatically explained a
violent murder complete with gestures, Samantha
climbed into his lap and went to sleep, oblivious.

"Smoking and drinking are the worst thing in the world,
and both of them I enjoy so much it's not funny. A lot of
people lead a healthier life than I do, and there's no doubt
about it, they're very healthy."

At the time of this series of interviews. Fuller's film
alamo charlie had just fallen through, literally at the last
minute: locations had been scouted, a crew lined up, cast¬
ing done, $200,000 worth of props and sets were waiting in
Oroville, when the rest of the money dried up. Lorimar
has announced that Peter Bogdanovich and Merv Adelson
will produce and Fuller will direct his long-planned the
big red one, closely based on his own experiences as a
footsoldier in World War II; Bogdanovich will play a role in
the film, according to Fuller, which will also star Lee Mar¬

vin, Jeanne Moreau, Stephane Audran, and Christa Lang.
Fuller recently played a role in Wim Wenders's new film.

For years. Fuller has been very generous in offering ad¬
vice to young filmmakers—reading their scripts, consult¬
ing on plot strategy, giving pointers on the writing of ac¬
tion scenes.

This interview should be taken as a progress report, an
update on Fuller, and an adjunct to more comprehensive
earlier interviews: Movie 17; Presence du Cintma 19 & 20
(translated in Will & Wollen, ed., Samuel Fuller); Cahiers du
Cinema 193; Sherman and Rubin, The Director's Event; and
"Mom, Where's My Suicide Note Collection?", Movietone
News 50, June 1976 (a special Fuller issue).

This interview is subtitled "3 X Sam" because it assem¬
bles as a montage three different types of material. The
first is designated EDITED TRANSCRIPT. These are Ful¬
ler's spoken words, collected in a series of interviews done
in mid-1976. Fuller had doubts about some of the things he
had said—particularly about some of the marvelous bits he
had related from unproduced scripts and their possible
appeal to writers not above appropriating material. Fuller
wanted several such passages stricken, and so they were:
original script ideas are his life. Then Fuller generously
wrote his own version of our interviews; this material is
labelled FULLER'S REWRITE. These are Fuller's written
words—his direct reportage. Finally, there are the script
excerpts from the big red one, labelled THE BIG RED
ONE—EXTRACTS. These show Fuller as screenwriter: a
master of the craft; a unique, personal voice; a strongly vi¬
sual thinker; a black humorist; and a bit of a surrealist.

I am grateful to Sam Fuller and Christa Lang for their
unusual generosity with their time, and to Richard Jame¬
son and Bill Routt.—R.T.

FILM COMMENT 25

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

would say, without any fucking ego,
that we have a pisscutter of a script
for alamo Charlie. I believe I
created a very unusual love story that's
very fresh—the opposite end of the pole
from the normal love story which goes
from satire to sophistication to drama.

Happy ending?

Yes and no. It's not that kind of a love
story. Only one thing can solve a situa¬
tion which I'd never seen in a motion
picture; I think it hits everyone in the
world, but they don't want to think
about it, and if they do, they ignore it.
And that's death. I don't mean any chi¬
canery, planned death. Sometimes
death eliminates obstacles that life can¬
not compete with. Death that's suppos¬
ed to bring some form of regret to the
loved ones, a loss, will bring that, but
there is a relief too—and I'm not talking
about sickness, about cancer, but just
about one word: death. A combination of
both relief and sadness is weird to any
human being, they don't want to face it.
I'm talking about sudden death that
opens up a whole world for people, a
world they know in their hearts they can
never really enjoy—but have to. Despite
the fact that they had nothing to do with
the tragedy.

It's a very, very difficult situation, and
I'm excited because it's legit. I thought it
would be interesting if a man who's
married to a woman—has a couple
kids—and he fell in love with a woman
who's living with another man for ten
years and who leaves that man, leaves a
warm, good, secure bed, for a man
whose bed she cannot share, and does
not share, and does not want to share:
it's not a sex story. This is not a sophisti¬
cated Noel Coward approach, nor a
French satirical approach, nor a heavy-
handed Swedish approach. It's just a
situation where it's possible for a man to
love his wife and two children and love
another woman just as much and not
know how to lick it. He can drive a truck
and that's all he can do. Nobody can lick
it. It's not being fair or unfair, it's not
favoritism.

That excites me because it's a legiti¬
mate situation of a man who has nothing
to offer—takes nothing, gives nothing;
of a woman who waits, has nothing to
offer, takes nothing; of a wife who waits
and has nothing to offer, nothing to give.
All of them are in limbo, and you have to
like them all. There's nothing wrong
between him and his wife, and there's
nothing wrong with his loving the other
woman, or her loving him. Sex has
nothing to do with it: that's all horseshit.
That's highschool kids masturbating
with their little metaphors. This man
can't cope with a situation that still exists
for, I guess, at least 5000 years: all hell
opens up for him and so does para¬
dise—and so does a world of violence, all

because of death. That's the dramatic
end of it. In contrast to that, I have a lot of
action.

Helicopters.

That's the biggest helicopter in the
world, a Sikorsky 64, 20,000 pounds. I
have it pick up a truck, a full semi rig.
The truckdriver's been conked on the
head. He wakes up, opens the door to
get out,and he's 4000 feet up. I have a
chase in there with the helicopter carry¬
ing the truck, chasing after another truck
on the ground. Just out of spite, he wants
to dump a truck from the sky on another
truck on the ground. That's a pretty un¬
usual chase. That's a very ordinary
example of what I mean by the action—I
really have a lot of action; I created like
hell, really worked my ass off.

[THE BIG RED ONE—EXTRACT]

PROLOGUE

SMALL SCREEN BLACK AND WHITE
FADE IN:

EXT. BATTLEFIELD—DAY (GHOSTLY
MIST)

SHELLSHOCKED HORSE runs amok thru
World War I debris. SUPERIMPOSE:

“NO MAN’S LAND”.

THE EYES OF CHRIST fill screen. Two gaping
holes. Broken strands of telephone wire form a
Crown of Thorns. The wooden face is bullet-

chipped, the cheek splintered. Christ on the enorm¬
ous Cross stands atop a high mound. Below ... a
young DOUGHBOY steps over a dead Hun still
wearing a grotesque gas mask and checks Yank
dead, looking for one particular soldier. The
Doughboy carries his rifle as part of his anatomy.
He checks dogtags when faces aren’t identifiable.
He finds the man he is looking for, pulls off one of
the dogtags, pockets it and HEARS the pounding of
hoofs. He turns. The snorting of the animal is above
him. He looks up at:

LOW ANGLE: THE HORSE, wild-eyed, rear¬
ing, stomping to kill.

THE DOUGHBOY dives out of the way of:

HOOFS stomping the ground, smashing the
rifle, splintering the stock.

THE DOUGHBOY runs for his life, crashes into
a bloated corpse impaled on barbed wire barricade,
gets snagged on wire, sees the horse charging. The
Doughboy tears free from the wire and leaps.

THE CORPSE stomped by the horse.
SUPERIMPOSE: “WORLD WAR I”.

THE DOUGHBOY claws up the high mound to
the thick base of the Cross, draws his trenchknife
from scabbard. It is an ugly weapon: steel hand-
guard, steel spike on the heel, steel spikes for
knuckles.

THE HORSE ascends mound to attack. The
Doughboy stabs at the horse. Angered, the horse
kicks the Doughboy off the mound, leaps over the
unconscious Doughboy, gallops off into mist. The
Doughboy appears dead. SUPERIMPOSE:
“FRANCE”.

The Doughboy stirs, opens his eyes, looks up at

Corporal Samuel Fuller in Troina, Sicily.

26 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Christ. Still shaken by the nightmare, the
Doughboy feels for any broken bones. None. He
finds his fallen trenchknife when he HEARS:

MAN’S VOICE: 1st vorbei. . . ist vorbei. . .

Huddling against the mound, tightening his grip
on his trenchknife, the Doughboy sees a big GER¬
MAN thru the mist. The German is wearing a field
cap. He sees the Doughboy. He advances.

BIG GERMAN: Der Krieg ist vorbei! Nicht
schiessen. Der Krieg ist—

His speech is broken as the Doughboy lunges at
him. The sad face of Christ, mouth open, watches
them battle—the German slashing with his
trenchknife—also an ugly weapon.

THE DOUGHBOY AND GERMAN
(CHRIST’S POV) thru two holes that are Christ’s
eyes. The Doughboy kills the German. The
Doughboy rests, wipes his trenchknife on the body,
scabbards the trenchknife. SUPERIMPOSE:
“NOVEMBER 11, 1918”.

THE DOUGHBOY breathing hard, notices the
color of red on the fallen cap of the German. (RED
IS THE ONLY COLOR IN THE BLACK-AND-
WHITE PROLOGUE.) The Doughboy picks up
the cap. The piping is red. An idea strikes him. He
shoves the cap in his cartridge belt, gets to his feet,
groggily walks away—stops—feels eyes on his
back. Someone is watching him. Slowly he turns to
meet:

THE EYES OF CHRIST watching him—sadly.

THE DOUGHBOY grunts, makes his way back
to his own lines. He vanishes into the mist.

EXT. AMERICAN TRENCH—DAY
(GHOSTLY MIST)

THE DOUGHBOY emerges thru mist, is sur¬
prised to find the trench deserted, tensely pokes
thru it. There is not a sound. He reaches a dugout,
hesitates, then pokes his head into:

INT. DUGOUT—DAY

THE DOUGHBOY, relieved to find his Captain,
who is alone, nursing a bottle of cognac. The
Captain—a long scar on his right cheek—is sitting
on an ammo box. A second box, with a weak lamp,
serves as a table.

Doughboy: Well. . . I’m glad you're still alive,
Captain.

Captain: Did you find the Major?

Doughboy (gives him dogtag): Not much of his
face left, sir.

The Captain looks at the dogtag for a moment.

Doughboy: What happened to the Company,
sir?

Captain: New bivouac.

He offers him the bottle.

Doughboy: Thanks. (Drinks.) Ever see a shell-
schocked horse?

Captain: No . . . can’t say that I have.

Doughboy: Well, I did, sir. He went loco . . .
tried to kill me. . . stomped my rifle. . . splintered
die stock.

He returns the bottle, pulls out the German field
cap and from it begins cutting off a 3-inch strip of
the red piping with his trenchknife. The Captain
watches curiously. The Doughboy holds up the red
strip against his left shoulder. It forms a red “ 1. ”

Doughboy: How do you like it, sir?

Captain: What the hell is it?

Doughboy: A patch. I’m going to recommend it
for the Division patch. 1st Division. Number One.
Red One. OK?

Captain(5w//^): OK.

Doughboy: Had to use my trenchknife on that
Hun.

Captain (his smile dies): When did this happen?

Doughboy: About an hour ago.

Captain: Did he yell out anything?

Doughboy: He gave me that same old war-is-
over bullshit.

CAPTAiN(g/v^ him bottle ): Finish it.

The Doughboy does.

Captain: The Armistice was signed 11 o’clock
this morning. (Checks watch .) The war’s been over
for four hours.

Shattered, the Doughboy slowly places the strip
of piping on the ammo box and stares at it. The im¬
pact of his act drains the blood from his face. The
Captain understands the anguish, fries to lighten the
blow.

Captain: You didn’t know it was over.

Doughboy: He did.

STRIP OF RED PIPING fills screen. OVER IT
title and credit cards.

END PROLOGUE
FADE OUT
© 1976 by Samuel Fuller.

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

or you, violence is an essential part of
drama.

For me? You mean for the world. From
the pious bastards with the Bible balls
pressed against the stained-glass urinals
huckstering Love Thy Neighbor and
Love Thy Christian Brother while
roughing up and crippling blacks to the
Jesus lovers in Lebanon painting streets
red because somebody is squatting to
their God in a different way to the hack¬
ing to death of two US officers over a
goddam tree to the Latin Quarter
battlefield in Paris where flics and stu¬
dents are reenacting our own campus
combat to peaceful conferences in Africa
called to meeting with machineguns and
executions to potshots at the President to
Manson's casualty list to South Ameri¬
ca's rhapsody of artillery and bazookas
to compromise in Ulster with so many
slaughters to San Simeon's bombing to
mentally-twisted mercenaries with cas¬
ket for hire to hijackers fattening their
press clippings and watching their own
TV exposure . . . for me ? Hell, the vio¬
lence going on as we're talking could
make a serial on film without horizon. It
is evident that without violence people
feel they'd become zombies, so for many
reasons violence is not abnormal but a
normal way of life. Children in Boston
are weaned on it.

Do you think that will change eventually?

Not as long as we have soapboxes and
pulpits to spout hate. My personal pref¬
erence is emotional violence because in
such a case the only field casualty is the
person struck down by a bullet of emo¬
tion.

Such as?

Brief encounter —a sensitive quiet
little chunk of emotional violence in¬
volving frustration of ennui, escape,
dishonor, failure, back to ennui again. It
has far more action than a barroom
brawl. It hits more people but unfortu¬
nately doesn't satisfy them. A physical
brawl does. A violent act is enjoyable
even as one squirms. If audiences didn't
like violence they'd stop having wet
dreams of killing the bastard who
double-crossed them in church, busi¬
ness, school, or in bed.

When you're driving a car and a car
hurtles from nowhere almost hitting you
and your blood plunges to your foot
jamming on the brake in that one split
second you are capable of killing that
person. That one split second, blossom¬
ing into 7200 seconds of outlet violence
on a screen, is what keeps good action
outselling religious tracts, travelogues,
family films.

For my appetite one of the most emo¬
tionally handled scenes on the violence
menu was in Hitchcock's torn curtain
when Paul Newman and a woman—
both amateur killers and virgins in
violence—find it most difficult to kill a
man no matter how hard they try and in
their panic they resort to a combination
that is clumsy and agonizing. It was
reminiscent of the agony and failure of
several men trying to kill Rasputin and
who could not—not because he was de¬
termined to live, but because they didn't
have the seasoned know-how of how to
get the job done with swift dispatch.
And of course, the swifter such a job is
done, the better, emotionally, for the
survivor.

To kill a human is the supreme act of
emotion in violence because we all fear
being the victim. To kill a human is hard.'
About as hard as it is to dig up a man to
finance a film. The objective is similar: an
accomplished act to continue to survive.

Have you ever killed anyone?

Have you?

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

know a little about fighting, very little.
On 147th Street between Broadway
and Riverside Drive, there's an incline
downhill from Broadway to the
Drive—in New York. I was walking
down and a fellow walked toward me.
We were both young fellows, and I di¬
dn't want to give way and he didn't want
to give way. I'm a little fella, he's a big
fella. I'm pointing that out because I was
standing above him. When he hit me,
my ass didn't have far to fall to hit the
sidewalk because of the angle. I was so
stunned, and he just kept walking—I'll
always remember that. What I don't like
about fights in movies is that they stage
them like kids fighting. Kids can go on
for ten or fifteen minutes and it becomes
an opera and a ballet.

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

ow big is the big red one going to be?
As big as World War II from the
very first individual shot fired and the
man who received that bullet in North
Africa in the Mediterranean Theater of
Operations to the very last individual
action in Czechoslovakia in the Euro¬
pean Theater of Operations, covering
three wet and four dry invasions.

An extensive film?

The illusion of one.

How?

FILM COMMENT 27

COURTESY SAMUEL FULLER

It will not have a division of tanks
kicking up dust at some Army camp or a
beehive of planes or cluster of ships.

Why not?

Because men are more important to
me in this war film than land, air, and sea
hardware. The visual thrill of seeing a
mass of steel on tracks and the sky dark
with clouds and the sea exploding with
ships is effective but fleeting. Once
you've seen it the thrill is gone. But the
man in combat is not fleeting, perhaps
not as picturesquely visual, but he is so
emotionally superior he dwarfs the in¬
animate size, the cold bulky bigness of
war.

Can you give me an example?

Three props. A watch, a pen, a piece of
paper. When the second hand reaches
the time selected, the pen scratches on
the piece of paper and men and allies
salute each other and the noise of war
begins. Again, the second hand reaches
the time selected, the pen scratches on
the piece of paper and men and foe sa¬
lute each other and the noise of war
ends.

Now ... in between the scratching of
those pens is the difference between to
kill and to murder and that is what the
big red one is all about.

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

ake a man who's sincere in the art of
killing—an infantry man is, it's a job.
You get used to sleeping in the ground,
not on it. You wake up, pee, shit, you
eat, you walk, you kill. You rest. You eat,
you shit, you walk a little bit, you kill.
You sleep. You wake up—and you do
the same thing again and again. Now
you get a robot like that and the killing is

just like driving your car, you don't think
about it. It's impersonal. And if you
don't know that the watch hit that cer¬
tain area at that time, if you don't know
about the signing of that paper and you
kill, you're a murderer. You're not a sol¬
dier, you're not a member of any army:
you're a killer, you've violated every
goddam rule—fuck any flag now and all
that horseshit, you're a butcher.

I've got one scene in an insane asylum.
We attack it. All hell breaks loose in the
nuthouse. It's a fire fight. And there's a
nut—he's watching. He sees sane Amer¬
icans and sane Germans, very sane, and
they're shooting. One man falls, killed.
This insane man wants to be like these
sane people because he's been in the
asylum all these years and it has been
driven into his mind that he is not part of
civilization. So he picks up the weapon
he saw this man use and starts experi¬
menting with it. It makes a noise, and it
hits the wall; it breaks a window, and in
the kitchen, it breaks pitchers. So he
goes into the corridor and he sees them
and he says to himself. I'm gonna do
what they do: I am now sane. And he
kills Germans, priests, inmates, and
Americans—with efficiency. Not only
that, but with delight, because he's so
proud, he wants everybody to see what
he's doing. Whattaya thin k? P eter [Bog¬
danovich*] loved it.

[ THE BIG RED ONE —EXTRACT]

INT. ASYLUM—DAY

THE SERGEANT AND MEN flat on the floor as
the inmate shatters barred windows, walls, ceiling
with Schmeisser bursts. To the inmate this is
fun—a game that makes a lot of noise.

GRIFF still on Walloon protecting her from
ricochets.

THE SS LIEUTENANT approaches, takes cover

June 5, 1944: Fuller (left) takes a rest before invading Omaha Beach. Photographed by Robert Capa.

from the Schmeisser’s bullets. Two Germans
emerge from the Laundry Room. They spot Coop
and rest of the Squad. Within seconds there is a fire
fight.

INMATE WITH SCHMEISSER upon seeing
men kill each other with noisy weapons grins. This
is more fun. He wants to play, too. The insane man
apes the sane GIs and Germans and fires the
Schmeisser at them. When they fall he is delighted.

COOP killed by the inmate.

THE SS LIEUTENANT killed by the inmate.

THE PRIEST killed by the inmate.

SWEAT pours down Griff’s face. He is still on
Walloon. NOISE of the Schmeisser firing con¬
tinues.

INMATE WITH SCHMEISSER runs out of
ammo. Still grinning, he dances with the Schmeis¬
ser over the bodies of GIs and Germans. He looks at
the men he killed. And he feels good. He likes this
noisy game.

THE SERGEANT, ZAB, VINCI, JOHNSON
slowly get to their feet in the quiet of the asylum;
they help inmates to their feet. The shooting is over.

GRIFF still on Walloon. Sweat pours over his
skin—sweat caused by the warmth and feel of her
body. She looks at his face inches from hers.

EXT. ASYLUM—NIGHT

ONION-SHAPED TOWER silhouetted against

the moon. Deathly peaceful.

(c) 1976 by Samuel Fuller.

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

Y ou've been wanting to make this film for
a long time.

Between Sicily and Belgium the idea
was there, but in those days the idea was
smoke in a windstorm you could see,
taste, touch, and was gone. In the years
that passed, that smoke has taken shape
with a more personal approach to imper¬
sonal violence, and with far more emo¬
tion because memory helps select emo¬
tion. The story of the five men in the big
red one is the story of that smoke. The
war is told through them. They not only
represent the 15,000 men of the 1st US
Infantry Division that wear the Red One
shoulder patch, but every man killed,
wounded, missing, or insane.

Films have been made along that line. -
Not this line. No training, no singing,
no regimentation, no flashbacks, no false
heroics. These five men are not killed
while writing to mother, fondling a kid's
photo, re-reading a letter from a sweet¬
heart. These five men are symbols. The
flesh they kill, the blood they spill, are
not the faceless enemy but human be¬
ings mesmerized into human animals be
they Vichy French, Fascists, Nazis. The
business of combat, with bitter humor, is
what makes the five men radiate the in¬
dividual hues representing the uniforms
of friend or foe. Since death is a private
emotion, in a wrong or right war, the vi¬
sual bigness of World War II, which was
a right war in contrast to the Mexican
War, Spanish-American War, Korea,
Vietnam, will be dramatized through
these five Dogfaces who survive to the
second scratching of that pen on that
piece of paper, but there is a selfish
cream of kindness that dominates their
survival. From the first narcotic taste of

28 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

combat there is no emotion in these five
men so that the lack of it becomes, in fact,
a strange kind of emotion. This vacuum
in them fills with another vacuum that
grows into an absolute nothingness that
is really the bigness and size of the
war. ... It is that thoroughly aware
feeling of death and still an insensitivity
about it that sets apart the individual act
of killing. I can best explain it by one fact:
the Infantryman not only sinks to the
degrading level of an animal but is get¬
ting paid to sink to that level.

[THE BIG RED ONE—EXTRACT]

A JEEP pulls up to the hill. Brodie and a Cor¬
poral get out, climb to the graveyard. Brodie’s lug¬
ging a bag of film, two cameras slung round neck, a
portable typewriter. They reach the Squad in the
graveyard. The Corporal looks around.

Corporal: How about it, Mr. Brodie?

Brodie: Sure.

Griffs reaction, more than the others, is numb
disbelief as the Corporal callously rearranges a
German corpse to pose with. Brodie aims his cam¬
era at them. The Corporal smiles. Click.

EXT. HUT—DAY

THE SERGEANT AND SQUAD approach. The
Sergeant waves Brodie behind a rock for safety,
deploys his men in zigzag advance toward the hut.
Brodie and his camera go to work.

QUICK SHOTS: THE MEN (THRU BRODIE’S
CAMERA). The Sergeant— click. Griff— click.
Zab— click. Vinci— click. Johnson— click.
Smitty— click just as he steps on a mine. Explo¬
sion.

THE SERGEANT after checking out the hut,
finding no enemy, examines Smitty’s blood-
covered groin. Smitty’s eyes bulge, the change in
his face frightening. The loss of his penis has snap¬
ped his mind. The Sergeant has to act fast. Brodie
and the puzzled men watch the Sergeant hunt for
something on the ground close to Smitty. When the
Sergeant is sure that Smitty’s eyes are watching
him, the Sergeant grunts.

Sergeant: Found it.

He picks up something. A tremor shakes Smitty.
A flicker in his glassy eyes as he stares at the
Sergeant’s hand and knows what is in it.

Smitty: It’s mine! Give it back to me!

The Sergeant tosses it away. Smitty groans.

Sergeant: Just one of your balls, Smitty.
(Smiles.) You can live without it.

Smitty hopefully, hesitantly probes his wet, red
crotch. The glaze in his eyes vanishes. Relief
sweeps his face. Then ecstasy. He laughs hysteri¬
cally—the strange, strange laughter of sanity.

Smitty: I still got it! I still got my cock!

© 1976 by Samuel Fuller.

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

n the big red one the five men really
become immune to fear because fear is
what actually triggers your trigger.
Without fear there is no alertness. And
when alertness does not exist, you are
killed. Therefore, even though only
through instinct, fear is what makes a
man fight, fear is what makes a man
smash his steel helmet into the fact of an
enemy, fear is what makes a man empty
a clip of eight rounds, jam in another
clip, and empty that—into one man.

How do you feel about Peter Bogdanovich
producing the big red one?

Great. When I first met Peter about

thirteen years ago he was familiar with
the anecdotes going into the big red
one. He is producing it because, as he
said, he wants to see this kind of a war on
screen. He sent my script to Lee Marvin
who will play the Sergeant. Peter has
agreed to play the role of one of the
Dogfaces named Zab. He won't be rec¬
ognizable in helmet with dirt, stubble
and the stink of urine, but he's right for
the character. He has the literate touch
Zab calls for, and by the third reel Peter
will be a literate killer of men.

Is there a love story in the film?

Yes. Between the Sergeant and four
riflemen.

No women?

Three. Christa Lang will play a Ger¬
man countess. Stephane Audran will
play an underground killer operating
from an insane asylum. Jeanne Moreau
will play a hotel-bar owner.

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

hat about film noir? Where did that
style come from? Why were so many
pictures made like that at the time?

Film noir: which means black film, but
it isn't really black, is it? Depressing?
Low? Sultry? Dirty? Perverse? The
shabby side of life? I don't know, I didn't
think too much about it. I never knew
what film noir was, but I knew if you're
going to do a story like pickup on south
street, that's what makes the character:
to live in a shadow.

If I have a character, a priest who's a
guide in the Vatican, and I wanted to do
the story of him moonlighting, leading a
Jekyll-Hyde existence, then I would
have a film noir of a priest in Rome, but I
would change him to a guide in the cata¬
combs. Visually, we are now going down
into the film noir , even though that is still
not film noir', it's only visual, it's not
emotional—a shabby location which
makes good visual shooting for a man on
speaking terms with the Pope. But what
he does to moonlight, secretly, must be
horrible: then we have an underworld
story. You can do that about anyone.
Film noir, I think, deals more with the
personal and emotional gutter feeling of
the people, rather than the visual. Film
noir could be about men living in pent¬
houses and girls living in beautiful Park
Avenue apartments—but the people
won't accept it that much because
they're used to the idea of that murky,
dismal, bleak photography.

[THE BIG RED ONE— EXTRACT]

EXT.REAR OF HOUSE—DAY

THE SERGEANT works his men to firing posi¬
tions, assigning each one a target: German on radio,
another studying map, another relaying coordinates
to crew in tank. The entire rear of the house is
gone—the tank had simply moved in. The walls of
the house remain. The sight of the tank in a house is
weird. The Sergeant and men open fire.

EXT. ORANGE GROVE—DAY

GRIFF squeezes trigger but cannot kill the man

he is looking at.

EXT. FRONT OF HOUSE—DAY

GERMAN MACHINE-GUNNER (THRU
GRIFF’S SIGHTS) reacts to the Squad firing be¬
hind the house. The rifle deliberately is lowered
from the head of the machine-gunner to his leg.
Griff fires. The startled German, hit in the leg, falls
forward. SOUND of the Squad firing increases.
The frightened German crawls to the women and
children. They attack him with picks and shovels.
INT. HOUSE—DAY

THE SERGEANT AND SQUAD finish off
enemy crew with grenades thru turret. It is suddenly
quiet. Tank crew dead. Vinci, moving between the
wall of the house and the side of the tank, spots
something on the floor, picks it up. His face turns
white as he stares.

PHOTOGRAPH of a wedding couple, the glass
shattered.

Vinci’S voice (quietly): That’s my mother and
father.

VINCI staring at photograph, the Sergeant and
men turning toward him.

Vinci: This is my grandmother’s house.

He spots a piece of a black dress under the tank
and he tears at the dress and hysteria mounts.

Vinci: She’s under the tank!

Chills hit the Sergeant and Squad as Vinci in¬
sanely feels under the tank for his grandmother. He
digs, claws, scrapes with fingernails.

Vinci: (shouting): Nonna! Nonna! Nonna!
NONNA!

Collapsing between wall and tank, he sobs,
holding the photograph close to him. A LITTLE
OLD LADY with white hair under black shawl en¬
ters, looking for the photograph. She sees it in Vin¬
ci’s hand. She reaches down and starts to take it. He
whacks her, sends her crashing against the slack
track on tank wheels. Her mouth bleeds.

Little old lady (in Italian): It’s my son’s wed¬
ding picture. . .please give it back to me. . .

Slowly her words register. The dazed Vinci lifts
his head and crawls to her and stares at her—and
then gently he wipes the blood on her mouth as he
sobs. . .

Old lady (puzzled; in Italian): Why are you
crying?

© 1976 by Samuel Fuller.

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

elieve it or not. I've got a yarn here j
called cain and abel, which I almost i
did at Columbia. The story of Cain and
Abel, no Biblical phony stuff—a biblical
story, but none of that "thou" or "thee";
that's how we say they talked. It's the
birth of emotion, that's my story: the first
lie, the first hypocrisy, the first cheat, the
first hate, the first murder. It's also the
discovery of death, according to the Bi¬
ble. How the hell did they know he was
dead? How did they know anything
about putting anybody under the \
ground—they'd never seen a dead ma n. \

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

ne day I'd like to make a film on
McCarthy the great Witch Hunter,
on Martin Dies, and on that shifty
character Parnell Thomas, and show
them as they were: racketeers sleeping
with the flag for a toga and ripping off a
nation for loot and position. It's uncanny
and funny how people catalogue a film
with any political substance when the
subject or part of the subject hits home. If

FILM COMMENT 29

I made a film about a very nice character,
a man with sentiment and honor, who
happened to be a pimp, there are people
who naturally would say that the maker
of the film was pro-pimp.

When you appeared in Godard's pierrot
le fou you said you were working on les

FLEURS DU MAL.

I think every writer's engine pumps
full speed one time or another to get
Flowers of Evil on the screen because
Baudelaire wrote copy so easy to trans¬
form from page to film. Every line he
wrote is so goddam visual. The same
goes for Rimbaud. Imagine what you
could do with a camera and a drunken
boat.

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

1 started with an unusual take-off for
me: Lysistrata. Originally, the idea was
to have a take-off on the girls who don't
want to fight, who want to stop war, so
they cross their legs and all that stuff. It
developed from there into a semi¬
science-fiction thing of some vapor in the
world that would make people impotent
in violence. And then I interject, to con¬
trast all this stuff of all these people, the
actual Les Fleurs du Mai , and how, in
that, he proved that everything is crap
because we are crap: no matter who the
hell we're writing about or talking about,
or even who the poet likes or doesn't like
—even he is full of crap. In my script I
described a visual way to shoot his lines.
Baudelaire—you think of the period he
lived in, and the colleagues he had, and
the trouble, and the sexual life, and you
should forget all that: just read what he
felt. They hated a lot of civilization, those
poets, God! Today it's very popular on
the screen, just look at taxi driver. For
your information, Verlaine, Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, Rousseau, Corneille, Racine,
every one of those men would make a
great motion picture.

Why are writers such good film subjects?
Because their personal lives had such
contrasts in emotion that you can't top it.
In other words, just picture a scene of
two women in Holland: a young woman,
and an older woman. They're at the foot
of a stairway and they're going up. One
is the wife of Verlaine; one is the mother
of Rimbaud. Now forget facts: they're
both going upstairs and there's a door.
Inside that room are Verlaine and Rim¬
baud; the mother and the wife know that
they're laying each other, and they're
going up there to stop it. They reach the
door. To me, the drama, emotional
drama, is in the hallway; I'm not in¬
terested in going inside that room, that's
all for those silly kinds of movies. I'm
interested in which of the women is
going to enter the room to talk. Is it the
wife? Is it the mother? And they chicken
out: "You go." "No, you go." "Why
should I?" "You're the mother." "But
you are the wife!" "Oh my God I don't

understand!" And they hear the men
whispering, and they go downstairs:
they haven't got the guts. That, to me, is
storytelling. And incidentally, much
more poignant than those two men.

You love moving camera shots , and you
love using cuts dramatically. How do you de¬
cide which one to use in a given situation?

Tempo. I love that tempo. I just walk
up and down in the cutting room with
my cutter, and it's like writing again. It's
very dangerous: you can become bored.
Generally, when I've finished a picture, I
run the assembly silent. Anything that
bores me I take out, and that's' wrong.
I've had fights with cutters to put stuff
back in instead of take stuff out. I never
fall in love with anything—it's like your
copy. You finish your goddam few
pages, you've done it, and you love it. I

goddam? And I don't agree with people
who say color is good for one thing and
black-and-white is good for another.
That's a lot of crap. It doesn't make any
difference. If it's a hit, there's your an¬
swer. There was a discussion about the
big red one being in black-and-white,
and I can't make it in black-and-white.
The Big Red One is the symbol borne on
the patches: I must see that red. I agree
that in other respects it makes no differ¬
ence if it's in black-and-white; in this,
particular picture, it really doesn't. War
pictures naturally are better in black-
and-white because you don't have to use
Heinz so much. Good God. Real blood is
quite difficult to photograph. It comes
out looking almost black; it congeals so
quickly and doesn't have the flavor of
ketchup.

Fuller, 1974, Photographed by Maureen Lambray.

don't care how beautiful it sounds: it
slowed me down, out it goes. Even
though you think it's so precious that it's
gold. It's not. Tempo. It doesn't mean
that I'm right—that's the whole beauty
of it. It's just my tempo; I think every¬
body has a right to his own tempo. If you
write a script and make a film, it would
not only be bad taste but insulting for
anybody to tell you how to do it. If you
want help, that's something else. But
everybody knows how to make a movie.
It's very popular now, they have class¬
es—which is very healthy—but they all
know how. My argument is, there's
nothing wrong in your knowing: make
it. Make your movie.

You seem to like CinemaScope.

No. It makes no difference to me. I
don't think the format of a book is im¬
portant, or the type of binding, or the
size of a goddam canvas, the size of a
page or the type of a screen, or the space
between paragraphs—who gives a good

[THE BIG RED ONE—EXTRACT]

4 ‘INVASION OF FRANCE’ ’.

WRISTWATCH ON A DEAD GI, washed by a
wave. It is 6:30. SUPERIMPOSE:

“JUNE 6, 1944”.

Water turning pink over the wristwatch. Cries of
“Medic!” and NOISE of German artillery, mor¬
tars, machineguns and rifles increases during the
following. A wave washes over the wristwatch. It is
7:00. Water is pink. A wave washes over the
wristwatch. It is 7:30. SUPERIMPOSE:

“OMAHA BEACH”.

Water turning red. A wave washes over the wrist¬
watch. It is 8:00. A wave washes over the wrist¬
watch. It is 8:30. Water is blood red.
SUPERIMPOSE:

“EASY RED”.

© 1976 by Samuel Fuller.

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

hen you set out to direct your first film,
how did you prepare?

I did one thing which I have always
done since. I drew, I wouldn't call them
caricatures, I would call them half-assed
portraitures, pin 'em up on the wall, and

30 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

when I wrote I looked up at them and the
contrast with the storyboard below
them, broken into three acts.

So you had already developed your flow
chart system by then?

It was not really a chart system, it was
something I had to look at to make cer¬
tain I didn't forget a character or when
he's introduced. I think you saw that
blackboard where I have white, which is
the chalk I use for the continuity of the
story; and yellow, for the introduction of
a'character; blue, for anything romantic;
and red, for action and violence. And if I
didn't have an increase in red from the
end of act one through the end of act two
to the end of act three, I knew I was in
trouble. I only did that not because I
need a chart—I've written a lot of stuff
without charts—but I was working on a
couple of other yarns and I have a habit
of sometimes working on another
character and slipping him into the
wrong story.

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

The lusty days, for one, which will be
produced by Martin Poll, who produced

THE LION IN WINTER and THE SAILOR WHO
FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA. It's an

African queen far-out comedy of a man
and woman during the Civil War (with¬
out the war being shown) moving on
four wheels instead of a boat. It's about a
lusty man and a lusty woman, both mer¬
cenaries, and their bawdy adventures.
Battle royal is a modern international
suspense flight and pursuit involving
the Arab takeover of the Western econ¬
omy. The charge at san juan hill is
about the Spanish-American War. In
19571 met the man who blew the charge
at San Juan. He was then with the 16th
Infantry, my regiment in World War II.
He told me exactly what happened on
that hill and it will make one hell of an
exciting film, far more exciting than
anything drummed up by propaganda
salesmen. He was awarded the Medal of
Honor for blowing that trumpet.

Then there is the rifle. A completed
script and a complete novel—but I
couldn't get anywhere with it. In a few
months the book will be published in
Spain under the title War Doves and if it
has a healthy sale, perhaps I can get an
American publisher for it.

Why couldn't you get anywhere with it?

It's about Vietnam.

Do you plan another Western?

Definitely. Pecos bill and the soho
kid is what happens 100 years ago when
a tough little Cockney kid comes to the
U.S. and in the West meets a legend, the
biggest liar of them all, Pecos Bill. It will
show the difference between a myth and
a legend. The West is discovered
through the eyes of the Soho Kid. The
script is ready to shoot.

And then toy soldiers —about kids in
the Civil War and their adventures with a
group of whores.

With your strong interest in realism , why f
haven't you done a documentary? /

You can't make a documentary—a real
one. They are staged.

[EDITED TRANSCRIPT]

Y ou can't make a documentary unless
by luck you happen to be at a certain
place when a thing is happening. You
stage it. You cannot make a documen¬
tary—you have to be forewarned. If
you're lucky or unlucky enough to be in
an area where there's a flood or twister,
you cover that as a story with real people;
and it's very difficult, because eventually
you'll find yourself putting down your
camera and helping someone—it's a
normal thing. —

A real documentary is: if I knew that /
you were a little bit half-cracked and you
kept telling everybody you were going to
kill Joe Doakes, I follow you into a bar
and I follow you into a massage parlor
and I follow you into a cafeteria, and I
follow you into Joe Doakes's apartment,
and I shoot you killing him. That to me is
a documentary. I have done nothing
with you: I have not interfered, I haven't
even talked to you. Nothing. And not
encouraged you to kill Joe Doakes, that's
important.

Morally , shouldn't you put the camera
down and stop me?

No, because you see I'm not getting
paid by the police to stop people from
shooting each other. I have no shield
number. I think I would normally try to
^top you, yes. But a lot of it depends on if
I had a little loathing for Joe Doakes; then
Lwhy should I stop you?

But I'm using that as a rough example.

[FULLER'S REWRITE]

Y ou filmed your daughter's birth?

Yes. Sound, 8mm color from labor
until Samantha was tucked into an in¬
cubator. It moved me, wearing a mask,
shooting life instead of death. It moved
me to the point where in the big red one
there's a scene of a few Dogfaces deliv¬
ering a French baby inside a Mark VI
Tiger tank during a rainstorm. They
strap the groaning, struggling, pregnant
French woman into the driver's seat,
lash her legs up with ammunition belts
used by the coaxial machineguns, cut
cheesecloth from a big wheel of German
cheese to make masks, fasten the masks
with diaper pins used to fasten their gre¬
nades and tighten their bandoleers, use
condoms for rubber gloves, the trench
knife to cut the umbilical cord, leggings
lace to tie up the belly button. It should
be effective because we'll not fake it.
We'll have a real pregnant woman and a
real delivery of a real baby. I think that
will be a little different for a big commer¬
cial war film, don't you?

[THE BIG RED ONE—EXTRACT]

EXT. BEACH—NIGHT

THE FRENCH COLONEL sees GIs landing,
illuminated by the flare. He is aghast to come upon
Broban and Moullet watching the enemy land.

French colonel: Broban—open fire!

Broban: Not at Americans!

The Colonel shoots him.

THE SERGEANT reacting to the first shot fired
throws himself down.

THE FRENCH COLONEL mans the ma-
chinegun himself, racks back.

French colonel (shouting): Feed the belt.

Moullet shoots him. The French Colonel slumps
on the machinegun. His finger hooked on trigger,
the dead man fires the machinegun. SUPERIM¬
POSE:

“INVASION OF NORTH AFRICA’ ’.
MACHINEGUN BULLETS rake beach. A GI is
hit. Griff stares at the first American killed on the
beach. SUPERIMPOSE:

“1:00 A.M”.

THE SERGEANT spots bursts from machinegun.

Sergeant: Follow my tracers!

He fires red tracers at the machinegun.
SUPERIMPOSE:

“NOVEMBER 8, 1942”.

MOULLET tearing dead French Colonel’s hand
from machinegun is killed by the Sergeant’s tracer
bullets. SUPERIMPOSE:

“ARZEW, ALGERIA”.

THE SQUAD firing, following red tracer bul¬
lets. French return fire. French mortar shells land.
The Sergeant leads his Squad toward French mortar
as Platoon covers advance. French resistance in¬
creases.

AMERICAN COLONEL (COMMANDING
16TH INFANTRY REGIMENT) jumps from as¬
sault boat, runs past Beachmaster bellowing thru
bullhorn, reaches a Major.

Colonel (shouting): They think we’re British!
Show ’em we’re Americans!

The Major fires an enormous heavy mortar. The
bomb bursts in the sky—displaying a gigantic
pyrotechnic of the American flag in brilliant colors.
A 4th of July fireworks.

THE SQUAD illuminated by the flag freezes.
Furious, the Sergeant caroms from man to man,
slamming them behind mounds as a French ma¬
chinegun fires. Hypnotized by the flag in the sky,
Minno stands in the light. He has never seen any¬
thing quite so beautiful and patriotic.

Sergeant: Minno! Move your big fat ass!

Minno is killed, the last thing he sees as he looks
up at the sky is Old Glory. The Sergeant uses Minno
for cover, dragging the corpse across exposed
ground toward path leading up to machinegun and
mortar. A French rifleman spots the moving corpse,
fires. Griff is horrified as bullets thud into Minno.
Zab is not.

Zab (thru cigar): Minno’s finally moving his big
fat ass.

Griff aims at the French rifleman but deliberately
raises his barrel and fires—missing. Guilt fills
Griff. Again he aims. Again he fires, deliberately
missing the human target. He cannot hit a man he
can see.

THE SERGEANT low behind Minno’s corpse
picks off the French rifleman. Zab, Vinci, and
Johnson fire rapidly at machinegun, toss grenades
that fall short. They cover the Sergeant who zigzags
close enough to grenade machinegun. But the
French mortar raises hell, pounding the mounds,
forcing the Sergeant and Squad to pack close to es¬
cape fragments. A mortar shell lands. The Squad’s
pinned down.

SULLIVAN’S HEAD lands in front of Griff.
Paralyzed, Griff stares at the head.

(c) 1976 by Samuel Fuller.

FILM COMMENT 31

IN THE REALM OF THE CENSORS

by James Bouras

In the September-October issue , Film
Comment ran a "New York Film Festival
Preview " ofNagisa Oshima's in the realm
of the senses, which was scheduled to be
shown at the Festival in early October. On
December 3 and 4, the film was finally shown
for ticket-holders at the Museum of Modern
Art. This article , by a Film Society of Lincoln
Center board member who worked to free the
film , describes what happened in between.

C ancellation of the 14th New York
Film Festival's public showings of
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES is
another reminder of the Federal Gov¬
ernment's vast powers in the field of
obscenity—powers easily overlooked in
view of the general, though inaccurate,
impression that the Supreme Court has
returned control of pornography to the
states.

The dispute surrounding IN THE REALM
OF THE SENSES involved a Federal law
against the importation of obscene mate¬
rial. The Memphis, Tennessee, convic¬
tions of Harry Reems and others
connected with DEEP THROAT involved a
Federal law against the interstate trans¬
portation of obscene material. And the
Wichita, Kansas, convictions of Screw's
co-founders involved a Federal law
against the mailing of obscene material.
(The convictions in the Screw case have
since been vacated; it remains to be seen
whether the case will be retried.) Still
other Federal laws deal with such things
as the broadcasting of "obscene, inde¬
cent, or profane language," obscene in¬
terstate telephone calls, and the unsol¬
icited mailing of non-obscene but "sexu¬
ally oriented" material.

The current Federal law against the
importation of obscene material—
United States Code, Title 19, Section
1305(a)—has been on the books since
1930 (although its predecessors date
back to 1842), has survived repeated at¬
tacks on its constitutionality (the Su¬
preme Court, for example, upheld it in
1971 and again in 1973), and is still ac¬
tively being enforced by U.S. Customs.

But what happened to IN THE REALM OF
THE SENSES was far from a typical Cus¬
toms obscenity case. Indeed, it is the
only case of its kind on the record. In the
typical case, allegedly obscene material
which arrives in the United States from
abroad will be "seized" (i.e., detained)
by Customs, and a Federal court will
then determine whether the material is
in fact pornographic. That's what hap¬
pened to James Joyce's Ulysses in the
Thirties (not obscene), I am CURIOUS
(YELLOW) in the Sixties (not obscene),
and a hard-core cartoon entitled
sinderella in the early Seventies

(obscene). In a related case, exhibition,
one of the films shown in the 13th New
York Film Festival (1975), was detained
by Customs when it arrived in New York
but was quickly released when the U.S.
Attorney declined to bring suit to have it
declared obscene.

T he print of IN THE REALM OF THE
SENSES intended for showing in the
14th New York Film Festival arrived in
Los Angeles on September 16, 1976, and
was released by Customs and formally
"entered" into the United States on
September 21. As is frequently the case
in Los Angeles, Customs officials did not
screen the film before allowing its entry.
The print was then sent to New York in
time for its scheduled showings at the
Film Festival: a press screening on Friday
afternoon, October 1, and public show¬
ings on Saturday evening, October 2,
and Monday evening, October 4.

Customs officials in New York, how¬
ever, questioned the propriety of the
film's entry in Los Angeles and told the
Film Society of Lincoln Center (which
sponsors the New York Film Festival)
that it could not proceed with the press
screening unless Government repre¬
sentatives were in attendance. The audi¬
ence for the press screening thus in¬
cluded three Treasury agents, a Customs
attorney, and Eleanor M. Suske, Chief of
Imports Compliance for the New York
Customs area.

Following the press screening. Cus¬
toms advised the Film Society and
Anatole Dauman, producer of the film,
that, had IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES en¬
tered the United States via New York,
Ms. Suske would have detained it and
turned the matter over to the U.S. Attor¬
ney. Dauman and the Film Society were
then told that Customs was exercising its
right to recall the film under a Federal
regulation which authorizes a "demand
[for] the return" of entered merchandise
which Customs later "finds . . . not enti¬
tled to admission into the commerce of
the United States." They were also told
that the print would be seized if any at¬
tempt were made to show it, and it was
ominously implied that other legal pro¬
ceedings might ensue. The threat of sei¬
zure continued throughout the next few
days and, as a result, the scheduled pub¬
lic showings of in the realm of the
SENSES were both cancelled. (Another
Oshima film, THE CEREMONY, was shown
instead, and ticket-holders were prom¬
ised free admission to a screening of the
cancelled film if and when it was freed.)

On November 1, Dauman, who had
refused to surrender the print, filed suit
in the U.S. District Court for the South¬

ern District of New York against Fred R.
Boyett, Commissioner of Customs for
the New York area, Ms. Suske, and the
United States.* The lawsuit, supported
by various affidavits, contested the va¬
lidity of Customs' recall demand (for¬
mally called a "Notice of Redelivery")
and sought (a) injunctions preventing
Customs and other Government officials
"from interfering or threatening to
interfere with the exhibition, possession,
distribution or transportation of the
film" and (b) a judicial declaration that IN
THE REALM OF THE SENSES is not obscene.

On November 8, the U.S. Attorney's
office filed an affidavit which an¬
nounced, to everyone's surprise, that
"[a]ll prior [Customs] demands for sur¬
render of the film have, in effect, been
countermanded." Specifically, the af¬
fidavit disclosed that the recall demand
had been withdrawn with the concur¬
rence of Customs officials in New York,
Los Angeles and Washington and would
not be reissued, and that Customs would
not make any attempt to prevent the im¬
portation of additional prints of IN THE
REALM OF THE SENSES. Significantly, the
affidavit also disclosed that the U.S. At¬
torney's office, which had screened the
film, "would decline any request [by
Customs] for a forfeiture action" against
it—a clear indication that an obscenity
proceeding against IN THE REALM OF THE
SENSES would not succeed in court. The
Government then moved to dismiss
Dauman's lawsuit as "moot" (i.e.,
academic).

At a hearing on November 9, Federal
District Judge Marvin E. Frankel refused
to dismiss Dauman's case. Characteriz¬
ing the Customs action against IN THE
REALM OF THE SENSES as "an outrage,"
Judge Frankel announced from the
bench that he would enjoin Customs
from pursuing its recall demand "or
from otherwise proceeding against the
film in question or prints thereof" under
the Federal law against the importation
of obscene material. His ruling was,
technically, a very narrow one: the pro¬
cedure followed by Customs was in¬
valid. Thus, he did not decide whether
the film is obscene, and his injunction
won't prevent proceedings against it
under other Federal obscenity laws (or
state and local laws). Technicalities
aside, however. Judge Frankel's ruling is
still of immense practical importance: the
Customs statute is the only obscenity
law which can used to prevent a film
from showing anywhere in the United
States—and now that won't happen to
IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES.

*Argos Films, S.A.R.L. v. Boyett, et al. (U.S.D.C.,
S.D.N.Y., Civil Action No. 76 Civ. 4838 MEF).

32 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

EXCERPTS FROM THE HEARING

MR. [WILLIAM G.] BALLAINE [ASST. U.S.
DIST. ATTY.]: My representation to the
plaintiffs and to your Honor is that the
notice of redelivery is being withdrawn.
There is no intention of issuing a further
notice of delivery, and there is no inten¬
tion by Customs to seize in the future this
film or any other print of this film and to
refer it for forfeiture under Section 305 of
the Tariff Act.

The court [hon.. marvin e. frankel,

DISTRICT JUDGE]: I understand that; but
then it seems to me that the forthright and
proper way for the government to handle
this situation, having put these people to
this trouble and this expense in these cir¬
cumstances, is to consent to the entry of a
judgment so ordering and not simply an¬
nounce grandly that you agree to do it
after they have had to sue you. .. .

I think this notice of redelivery by a
roving censor who happens to work for
the Customs is an outrage, and I am per¬
fectly willing not to write a passionate
opinion saying so, but I am not just going
to let the case dribble away because you
now acknowledge that.

I think there ought to be a judgment
against you for whatever precedential
value that it has, at least for me.

Mr. BALLAINE: If I may, your Honor,
perhaps I could go into some of the facts
surrounding the redelivery itself since
your Honor does feel so strongly... .

The COURT: ... If what you are doing
now is generating an oral position in op¬
position to the motion for preliminary
injunction, you are too late. It is a First
Amendment problem. You filed some
papers which say "We don't resist the
motion." That is what they say to me, be¬
cause it is moot. Well, I am telling you the
consequence of that. You have receded
from your position, which on the paper
before me is a position in violation of the
First Amendment. Maybe you want a
third alternative. One of my law teachers
told me there can only be two alterna¬
tives, but I do not think that is correct any
more so we will consider a third. On your
failure to oppose I will order the issuance
of a preliminary injunction and then if
you want to, if you think this case is worth
pursuing further to the point of a final de¬
cision short of my having to see this
movie, I will be delighted to do that.

Mr. BALLAINE: ... Perhaps I should just
say, if I haven't said it explicitly, that for
purposes of the record we really cannot
concede the illegality of the procedure
that the Customs followed in this case.
We honestly believe that the case was
mooted out and that was our primary
thrust in the papers, but I would at least
like to say for the record that we really
cannot concede the illegality—

The COURT: I don't care whether you
concede it or not. A judgment enjoining
305 procedures doesn't have to rest on

any concession by you or, indeed, on any
contested adjudication by me. If you are
not resisting, which you are not, it can
just be an injunction entered because, for
whatever reasons, the government
doesn't oppose an injunction. It seems to
me the only question is whether it should
be a preliminary or final injunction. That
has die grave impact of affecting our sta¬
tistics, and I do not care very strongly
about that. .. .

I understand from communications to
my office that the plaintiffs want a de¬
claratory judgment on the non-obscenity
of this film; and in the posture of this mo¬
tion and the case generally I am not going
to give it to them, but if you want to argue
about it against that unlikely situation,
you may... .

MR. [KENNETH] WARNER [ATTY. FOR
PLAINTIFF]: It is our contention that as a re¬
sult of the actions of the United States
Government .. . there has been what we
have described in our papers an aura of
illegality and obscenity created sur¬
rounding this film.

the materials before me there is an over¬
whelmingly persuasive and undisputed
demonstration that the procedures fol¬
lowed by the Customs officials in this case
were invalid, this turns out to be another
case where a judge is required to forego or
is required to be deprived of the opportu¬
nity to test his prurient interest by view¬
ing the object of art and pursuing that line
of inquiry. Sol am not going to do it.

MR. WARNER: We had hoped that your
Honor would agree with us that ... the
question of obscenity... has substantially
aggrieved our plaintiff from being able to
market the film because of the fear that's
been created and the chilling effect than
an announcement or pronouncement of
obscenity, circulated throughout the na¬
tional and international media, caused.

The COURT: All you have got—what is
her name, Suske?

Mr. WARNER: She is the local—

The COURT: All you got is Ms. Suske's
pronouncement it is a dirty movie. If she
has that much clout in the international
and national cinematic scene, you are in

The COURT: I should think you would be
delighted. One, it is obscene and two,
you have a license to show it. Anyhow,
let's make sure, the vice in the govern¬
ment's proceeding in my judgment is its
procedure, and finding the procedure in¬
valid at the threshold, I am not going to
give you a declaratory judgment that
suggests by any manner or means that
you can't be prosecuted under some other
federal statute next week, and if that is
what you have in mind, you are wasting
your time. ...

Mr. WARNER: Your Honor, it is our con¬
tention in regard to the obscenity of the
film, this is something that the producer
of the film, who is not really in the
obscenity business at all, would not find
satisfying. In France, as a matter of fact,
there was a declaration—

THE COURT: Forget that. That was a little
facetious. You just have no way in the
world of getting a declaratory judgment
in this case that is going to cover any situ¬
ation other than your Customs situation.
And since the government does not re¬
sist, in my judgment wisely, and since on

great trouble, but it is not enough to get
you a declaratory judgment....

The Court finds that [the Customs]
notice of redelivery was invalid ... first of
all because it is essentially violation of the
Customs Bureau's own regulations ....
If, contrary to what I think on this sketchy
record, the regulations could fairly be
construed to permit this kind of proce¬
dure, then I would hold the regulations,
at least for purposes of this preliminary
injunction proceeding, are unconstitu¬
tional; that the Customs Bureau was
never authorized to exercise this kind of
authority to reconsider the admissibility
of things once admitted and to seize them
by virtue of so-called redelivery notices,
thus spreading a pall of uncertainty over
materials that are presumptively within
the First Amendment whenever they
happen to be shown or exhibited in any
city or place where there is a Customs in¬
stallation. I am encouraged in that view
by an awareness that the federal govern¬
ment has ample authority to proceed
against obscenity without giving this kind
of power to Customs officials. AC

FILM COMMENT 33

THE FILM
CRITICK: FIVE
ACADEMIC
SPECIES

identified by
Michael Pressler

with illustrations by the author

THE SEMIAPOLOGIST

Often popularly confused with the
stricturalist, the semiapologist may be
distinguished by its plaintive cry of

“metz . . . metz_” Specimens I

have personally observed follow a
unique hunting ritual, called the syn-
tagmaphoria. The beast makes slow,
deliberate circles around its prey (the
Godard, the Vertov), finally leaping
upon it and devouring it at a whack.
Some believe this behavior is meant to
confuse the victim; others suspect it is
a form of self-hypnosis; but until more
research is done in this area we shall
not know for sure. It may just be
ecstasy. Semiapologists are a nesting
species, and can be seen inhabiting the
higher branches of old-world trees.

THE AGTOGRIST

Originally native only to France, the
autourist eventually migrated to
America, where there are now several
distinct genera. The American group,
also largely urban, occupies itself by
searching out the tender shoots of
Fords, Sirks, and Borzages. (Most
other species find the latter two indi¬
gestible.) Doctor Pitkin has recently re¬
ported autourists seen munching
about near some apple pie, but I find
this hard to believe. Its mortal enemy is
the Kael.

THE STRICTURALIST

The stricturalist is noted for its ec¬
centric feeding habits. Rather than take
an entire meal to its lair, this indis¬
criminate eater brings only a small
piece at a time. Running swiftly, the
morsel gripped in its beak, the stric¬
turalist returns to its hut with the catch.
Only when this portion has been
laboriously worried over will it return for
more. After the pattern of Levi-Strauss
(with which they have many primitive
similarities), stricturalists use thin twigs
and grasses to fashion themselves
small, grid-like dwellings. During the
day they are often found scribbling in
dark places.

THE STARBUFF

The starbuff is easily distinguished
by its colorful plumage and its
entertaining—some contend
frivolous—behavior. At one time, this
species could be found only in the
greater Los Angeles area. But today
starbuffs roam freely about the western
states, nibbling at the leaves of the
Streisand and the Bogdanovich.

Some, I understand, have been spotted
as far east as Cannes, but they rarely
wander below the equator. Always on
the move, starbuffs build up small
mounds of fresh newspaper, on which
they lay their eggs.

THE CINEMAPLURALIST

I have not been able to find any logi¬
cal pattern for this species’ behavior.
Generally they seem to wish to remain
aloof. In high fettle, the cinemapluralist
hops from tree to tree in rather
haphazard fashion, often hesitates,
wavers, jumps forward and backward
on the branch, and will sometimes go
so far as to openly twit other types of
critick. On the one occasion I managed
to track this creature to a stop, it
climbed an Agee and, having cun¬
ningly concealed itself in the foliage,
began making a sound which was
something between the warble of a
Durgnat and the cry of an offended
Kael. Such fickle behavior has yet to be
satisfactorily explained. $>

34 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Hindi-

HPEND-

Hents

A READER'S DIGEST
OF THE AVANT-GARDE (IV)
by Amos Vogel

D id you know that LAST YEAR IN
MARIENBAD is not an avant-garde
film, and that Jean-Luc Godard
not an avant-garde filmmaker? Did you
know that one can discuss the history of
the American film avant-garde without
mentioning Maya Deren? Well, folks, it's
all there and more in the swinging essay
by Whitney Museum's film curator John
Hanhardt, which accompanies the na¬
tionally distributed American Federation
of Arts series, "A History of the Ameri¬
can Film Avant-Garde." Considering
the illustrious additional supporters of
this event (Museum of Modern Art, New
York University, National Endowment),
a new generation may indeed accept it as
history. My task is to expose it as myth.

To make an earlier era conform to a
preconceived, sectarian thesis, it is nec¬
essary to truncate it, telescope periods,
erase institutions, inflate tendencies,
and introject retroactive fantasies into
the defenseless past. The patient is the
avant-garde movement; the merciless
surgeon is a partisan of structural cine¬
ma. Since this particular tendency is still
recent and only one among others, ut¬
most concentration on it leaves huge
gaps in history and creates a myth by
implosion, temporal condensation, and
liquidation of entire classes of important
directors.

Purportedly, the Hanhardt essay deals
with the movement's 1942-1972 evolu¬
tion. However, the immensity important
1942-1958 period (sixteen years) is col¬
lapsed into half a paragraph while thir¬
teen pages are devoted to the next four¬
teen years, a period more "amenable" to
pro-structural manipulation. Such con¬
densation of older history may appear ir¬
relevant or justified only to those un¬
aware of what has been omitted in the
process. Since the vast majority of major
talents of the late Sixties were already
fully at work in the Forties and Fifties
(Peterson, Broughton, Conner, Brak-
hage, Vanderbeek, Breer, Emshwiller,
D'Avino, Anger, Markopoulos, Maas,
etc.), and since hundreds of films were
being produced, the period was one of
the most vital in avant-garde history. By

a sleight of hand, Hanhardt eliminates it
in favor of an aggressively erroneous
apologia for structural cinema as the
movement's immanent essence and
manifest destiny. Here is his method in
action, as he pretends to deal with this
1942-1958 period while simultaneously
erasing it.

"Every year, more and more films
were produced, some screened at
Cinema 16 or at the Filmmakers' Cinema¬
theque." The deliciously tiny "or"
hides nothing less than a seventeen-year
gap. Cinema 16 started in 1947; the
Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964.
During this "erased" (and most fertile)
period. Cinema 16 premiered (not
"screened") all (not "some") of the lead¬
ing avant-gardists. The Filmmakers'
Cinematheque could not very well do
that, since it did not exist. Undaunted,
Hanhardt continues:

"The Cinema 16 screenings were at¬
tended by the new generation of
filmmakers. In addition, writings on
and by these filmmakers appeared in
Film Culture magazine, which became,
in the late 1950's, the houseorgan of the
independent New American Cinema."

The delicate phrase "in addition"
deftly implies a simultaneity between
Cinema 16 andFilm Culture which is en¬
tirety fabricated. Eleven years are con¬
densed into two words. Cinema 16
started in 1947, Film Culture in 1955—
remaining, however, anti-avant-garde
until 1958. (Mekas denounced the
movement as a homosexual conspiracy,
attacking its leading directors by name in
a famous Film Culture essay.) Here is
what this collapsing of an eleven-year
period manages to sweep under the rug
(besides Cinema 16's activities detailed
in the last issue):

1. Frank Stauffacher: Filmmaker,
founder of the catalytic 1947 "Art in
Cinema" avant-garde film series at San

Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.
ABSENT.

2. Parker Tyler: The one American cri¬
tic who was part of the avant-garde,
championed it tirelessly in essays, pro¬
gram notes, books, pamphlets; mentor
and moral conscience of the avant-
garde. ABSENT.

3. Maya Deren: The single most im¬
portant catalyst of the movement: film¬
maker, exhibitor, distributor, lecturer,
publicist, author, scholar, organizer,
cajoler, passionate fighter—the person
who transformed events into a move¬
ment. On Page 23 of Hanhardt's essay
appears a quote, only subsequently
identified as by "Deren." Who is she? It is
a measure of the cultural scandal of this
essay that this represents the first and
only mention of Maya Deren or her role.
(Instead, two structural theorists rate
nine pages; three structural filmmakers
rate for more.) But though Maya is not
mentioned, she is co-opted. The first,
most important still in the book (a full-
page still directly facing the title page)
shows Maya in MESHES OF THE AFTER¬
NOON, arms outstretched, palms turned
out, in effect "blessing" the book and the
exhibition.

4. The Creative Film Foundation: the

first and only foundation ever in
America entirely devoted to the avant-
garde; created by the afore-mentioned
"Deren." Only she could have assem¬
bled—as its directors and judges—
Meyer Schapiro, Rudolf Arnheim,
Joseph Campbell, Barney Rosset, Parker
Tyler, myself, Alexander Hammid,
James Johnson Sweeney. For several
heart-breaking years, she devoted most
of her time to fund-raising for filmmak¬
ers; in vain. A true pioneer, she was "too
early." Nevertheless, the foundation
served the extremely important purpose
of choosing the best American avant-
garde films of the year, with Tennessee
Williams, Salvador Dali, Clement

Godard: Not an avant-garde filmmaker? Jean- Pierre Leaud in LACHINOISE.

FILM COMMENT 35

Greenberg, et al. presenting the awards
at special annual Cinema 16 events to
young filmmakers; Emshwilier, Conner,
D'Avino, Breer, Menken, Brakhage,
Maas, Vanderbeek, etc. ABSENT.

5. Amos Vogel: For thirty years, a par¬
ticipant in the unfolding drama of the
movement, whose role as founder-
director of Cinema 16 must be left to
others to evaluate. ABSENT

6. David Bienstock: the final, most un¬
forgivable "liquidation." Though be¬
longing to a later period, here is someone
who never denied the past, drew suste¬
nance from it, and built upon it. He does
not exist for Hanhardt, for Willard Van
Dyke (chairman of the American Federa¬
tion of Arts Film Committee who wrote
the book's introduction crediting
Hanhardt for everything at the Whit¬
ney), for those who composed a page of
acknowledgments thanking everybody
except Bienstock. After all, he was only
Hanhardt's predecessor at the Whitney,
only its first film curator, only the foun¬
der of the entire film program there. AB¬
SENT.

T his entire debacle could have been
avoided. Here are some suggestions:
Keep the exhibition as is, but rename it
"Hanhardt's Metaphysical Fantasy." Or:
Do not place historical surveys into the
hands of one-eyed sectarians. Do not let
the catalog be written by an institution
nationally known as fountainhead of one
(the structural) tendency: New York
University. Increase the number of pro¬
grams from seven to about twenty.
Create a selection board representative
of all tendencies. Do not drown your
essay in lists of names—Peckham, Butor,
Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Pleynet, Sarris,
Kracauer, Cavell, Michelson, Wollen,
Vertov, Duchamp, Boulez, Foreman,
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, Bazin,
Atget, Lawder, Daguerre, Fry, Sitney . .
as piece de resistance , Husserl .. I mean,
what else? While their (ever so casual)
mention does not necessarily elevate the
reader into a state of culture, it does tes¬
tify to the author's insecurities.

The world is full of misunderstand¬
ings, and so I repeat that my opposition
to this exhibition does not signify oppo¬
sition to its many excellent (often excel¬
lent structural) films—or to Hanhardt,
whom I continue to consider a serious
film person capable of growth. My oppo¬
sition has to do with absent action,
crimes behind the screen, "betrayed"
truth. A part of a movement is touted as
all of it; all else is liquidated; and we are
left with a torso brutally squeezed into a
Procrustean bed instead of with the far
richer, far deeper originality and beauty
of the "real" movement in all its com¬
plexity and splendor. ©

A reply by John Hanhardt appears on
page 62.

ROCKY AND
HIS FRIENDS

by Stuart Byron

I ndustry was puzzled. He had ob¬
served all of the advance stories on
the motion picture rocky with curios¬
ity and admiration, and he had assumed
that his colleagues in the film-oriented
press had done the same. Now Industry
discovered that he was wrong. Whether
rave, pan, or what Variety calls "no opin¬
ion," review after review of rocky tore
into the crescendo of advance comment
which this low-budget story of a two-bit
Philadelphia boxer had received. In The
New York Times , Vincent Canby devoted
almost half his unfavorable notice to the
publicity question; on New York's
"Channel 2 News," Pat Collins gave
rocky her highest rating (a "perfect 10")
on her Scoreboard, but warned her
viewers to forget "the ridiculous public¬
ity campaign"; in New West Stephen
Farber, as casually as a Pacific breeze,
began his mezzo-mezzo write-up by call¬
ing the movie "lively and likable, though
it fails to live up to all the excessive ad¬
vance hype."

Industry was chagrined. He well un¬
derstood, perhaps even sympathized
with, the animus against what Hol¬
lywood usually means by "a publicity
campaign." Such campaigns were/are
based on hypothetical elements, and the
loci classici had been Cleopatra, the
great gatsby, and now king kong. The
hype for those pix took off from big
budgets, production elements, stars,
"properties." But Industry pondered
that the rocky situation had been differ¬
ent. Had, in fact, been exactly the oppo¬
site. None of the above-named critics—
not Film View, not Scoreboard, not L. A.
Journal—could claim that he or she had
read a word about rocky beyond routine
press releases while it had been in pro¬
duction. All of the "hype" had been
based on the completed movie—had
come from people who had seen the
completed movie. And was this not what
these scribes and others had long called
for? Had they not loudly complained
that low-budget films of quality from the
past had not been accorded studio cam¬
paigns? Had they not issued cris d'alarms
over the indifference of the major com¬

panies to such as pretty poison, the

CONVERSATION, and THIEVES LIKE US?

Had they not seen many a well-reviewed
low-budget movie wither on the box-
office vine because not supported by
studio hoopla? Finally, Industry was
moved to ask himself the ultimate ques¬
tion: Should not, indeed, the critics have
congratulated United Artists for a job well
done on behalf of rocky?

He thought, in fact, that the UA cam¬
paign deserved chapter-and-verse doc¬
umentation in his January-February col¬

umn as a model for the future. Industry
was sure that UA would welcome this
idea, would feel it deserved a pat on the
back. With bold resolution, he tele¬
phoned Contact, his man at UA's New
York publicity department. And within
two minutes Industry was chagrined
anew. Contact's department was far
from self-adulatory, far from boastful of
how it had turned rocky, a nowhere
man, into a contender, Oscarwise in¬
cluded. Indeed, Contact was defensive.
UA disclaimed responsibility. It was hurt
and offended by all of the suggestions
that it had twisted the arms of writers. It
was pre-Pasteurian, claiming that the
ROCKY"hype" was a product of spon¬
taneous generation. Nonetheless, In¬
dustry was persistent. Surely UA would
tell him what had happened if not how.
Contact, in the parlance of the trade,
promised to "go to bat" for Industry,
pledged to ask his ultimate boss, the Big
Cheese, to give Industry a half-hour of
his (Cheese's) time.

Industry, upon reflection, was not re¬
ally surprised about all this. If the motion
picture industry obsessed him above all
others, it was partially because you could
not always say that it followed the prin¬
ciple that nothing succeeds like success.
This made it unique in the American
corporate system. Almost a decade ago
Industry found a dovish Warner Brothers
regime which had inherited the green

36 JAN UARY-FEBRUARY 1977

berets from a hawkish one talking of the
movie as "an embarrassment" even after
it was a commercial success, forcing re¬
porters to call John Wayne personally for
details of grosses and rentals. Industry
thought that the awkward phrase "art-
industry," time-honored description of
the picture business, still an accurate
monicker; he was annoyed when Paul¬
ine Kael or Stephen Farber simplified
matters into an opposition of "the busi¬
nessmen" and "the artists."

UA could be forgiven a reluctance to
take credit where credit was due; such a
procedure had backfired in the past, as
with last tango in paris. Still, Contact
was willing to peek in the files and report
to Industry on just what this pre-release
"hype" had consisted of. It turned out
that the whole enchilada was made up
only of five stories: Guy Flatley's inter¬
view with Sylvester Stallone in his "At
the Movies" column in The New York
Times last September; Louise Farr's story
in the sister publications New York and
New West ; Pete Hamill's cover story in
the Village Voice ; a half-page report in the
Show Business section of Time; and a
feature in Women's Wear Daily. Survey¬
ing this list. Industry thought that com¬
plaints of "hype" had really resulted
from the Times and Voice breaks. The
twin Felker slicks, like Fairchild's WWD ,
after all, specialize in predicting the sen¬
sational, the "in," weeks before they be¬
come common currency; such discov¬
eries are their stock in trade, and had
they alone been all that had appeared to
herald rocky, few would have been
alarmed. As for Time, its piece had
largely been a story about the other four,
reportage on the reaction to the movie
rather than on the movie itself. No: If
"hype" were to be proven, it was At the
Movies and the person who once had a
column in the New York Post with the
imaginative title of "Pete Hamill" who
would have to be revealed as the victims
of a scheming studio.

I ndustry called At the Movies, who
had a strange story to tell. "Back in
August, there was this ad in the Times
about a preview at the Baronet. The pic¬
ture wasn't named, the studio wasn't
named. All it said was that a film which
would open in December in New York
and Los Angeles in order to qualify for
Academy Awards was going to be
sneaked. It intrigued me. I called around
and called around, and all I could find
out was that it was a United Artists pic¬
ture. So I called my contact at UA, and
far from urging me to attend, he was
most upset at my curiosity. At first he
wouldn't even tell me what the picture
was. So I played a game with him: I'd
say, 'Guess I'm coming to see network
tonight,' and he'd say, 'Well, it isn't
network.' The same back-and-forth
with bound for glory. Finally, he told

me it was this rocky. He said, 'I can't
prevent you from coming, but I certainly
won't pass you in.' I don't remember
whether I used my Walter Reade Thea¬
tres pass, which involves a fifty-cent ser¬
vice charge, or whether I just paid the
regular admission—I'd be reimbursed by
the Times in any case—but whatever I
did, I paid. Well, of course the audience
went wild, and so I—on my own—
contacted Stallone in Hollywood for the
interview."

At the Movies was more bemused
than angry at the rocky publicity con¬
troversy. Not so "Hamill," who was so
upset at the seeming accusation that he
had lent himself to an orchestrated cam¬
paign that he had considered firing off an
outraged missive to Film View. "Because
if anything the opposite had been the
case. I was out in Hollywood in early Oc¬
tober and I heard about the picture from
a producer—I think he'd seen it because
he was considering hiring somebody
who had something to do with rocky.
Well, he raved and raved about it, and I
had a special interest because I'm writing
a novel about boxing. So I called UA out
there, and they informed me that there
would be no press screenings until the
end of the month and that there was
nothing else that they could do for me.
United Artists didn't lift one finger for
me. It was like pulling teeth to get to see
the picture. Finally I reached Irwin Wink¬
ler, one of rocky's co-producers, and he
reluctantly agreed to set up a special
screening for me. Even that took a week.
And I certainly didn't know until after¬
ward, when I called Clay Felker, that he
was planning a story for New York and
New West."

I ndustry listened to these two tales
with a growing sense of alarm; the
earth seemed falling out from under
him, taking with it his column for
January-February while deadline fast
approached. For if At the Movies and
"Hamill" were to believed—and they
were known as honorable men—the
whole subject of Industry's inquiry had
been rendered moot. United Artists
seemed not to have had a publicity cam¬
paign on rocky at all. No longer did In¬
dustry's question concern whether UA
had acted morally or immorally with
rocky. It was whether it had acted,
period. Was UA being blamed for some¬
thing which had happened in spite of it
rather than because of it?

But Industry realized instantly the
faults of this line of thinking. Both At the
Movies and "Hamill," after all, were not
exactly rocky virgins when they saw the
movie. Both had been motivated by an
outside event. Take that preview ad, for
example. It was, certainly, a clever bit of
p.r. Industry recalled that it had been the
talk of the New York film world all that
week. The idea of an important Christ¬

mas movie being shown so early had ex¬
cited all his friends. Could it be nickel¬
odeon? THE LAST TYCOON? Rumors of
rough cuts of king kong and a star is
born even filled the air.

Then there was the fact that any idiot
who saw rocky could tell that it was
going to be a smash. It was not one of
those successful films, like easy rider or
the way we were, which justified varied
prognoses of commerce; some of the best
business minds in the industry had seen
those two pictures early on and pre¬
dicted failure. But rocky, like bullitt
and jaws, was another story: Dollar
signs flew from the screen, and it
couldn't have taken more than one
showing in some fancy private screening
room on the "Bel-Air circuit" for the
word to get around Hollywood. Produc¬
ers must have immediately become in¬
terested in director John G. Avildsen and
writer-star Stallone for future work and
asked to see prints. This practice was so
common in the movie capital as to hardly
be worth repeating. That "Hamill"
should hear about rocky as a result of
such unofficial screenings seemed al¬
most inevitable.

As Industry mulled all this. Contact fi¬
nally got back to him about seeing the Big
Cheese. Negative. Not for personal rea¬
sons, but because the controversy over
the rocky publicity campaign was be¬
ginning to have internal implications. It
was a familiar story. An agency had
taken out an ad in the Hollywood trade
papers some weeks before—before the
reviews for rocky were even in—con¬
gratulating a production executive on all
the attention the film was getting, and,
by implication, suggesting that this
client of theirs was the one responsible.
So a fight was on for the credit (which,
after the reviews, was to become to some
the blame), and Big Cheese had enough
tsouris without giving out an interview
on that very subject. But credit for what?

By now, it really didn't matter to In¬
dustry. He thought he had it all figured
out. Rocky had enjoyed a planned pub¬
licity campaign all right, but a singularly
modern one. Someone—United Artists,
Chartoff-Winkler Productions, a pro¬
duction executive, all of the above—had
taken a leaf from modern pedagogy. You
know: you don't drill something into the
student, but motivate the student to
want to learn it. Nobody sold a bill of
goods to the press on rocky, but some¬
body created an atmosphere in which
the press wanted to buy. It was, almost,
the Augustinian metaphysical paradox:
God had determined everything but
each individual still retained free will.
Industry remembered the sign which
had greeted him when he entered the of¬
fice of his first publicity job: "Half the
money I spend on advertising and pub¬
licity is wasted, but I don't know which
half it is."

FILM COMMENT 37

THE DISCO HUSTLE
by Richard Koszarski

J ohn Findlatter held a print of JAWS in
the fingers of his right hand. It was
round and flat, silvery and flexible,
and quite capable of being rolled for
shipment into a tube. A year from now it
should be selling well at Goody's and
Korvette's, along with PSYCHO, EARTH¬
QUAKE, SPARTACUS, and ALL QUIET ON THE
WESTERN FRONT. But while a hot print of
JAWS might cost you $300 on the 16mm
black market, the version to be marketed
by MCA Disco-Vision will retail, like any
top album, for $10 or less.

This at least was the prediction of
Disco-Vision president Findlatter, who
from his office high above Universal City
is plotting this year's initial test market¬
ing of the revolutionary home video sys¬
tem. The final fruition of a multimil¬
lion-dollar scramble among the world's
electronics giants, Disco-Vision should
turn upside-down the whole world of
entertainment packaging and informa¬
tion storage, at least if this 1977 game
plan unfolds as scheduled: for $500,
thousands of consumers across the
country will buy a Philips-devised player
unit which will sit compactly atop their
television sets, the feed lines hooked di¬
rectly into the sets' VHF terminals. In
appearance remarkably similar to a small
(audio) record player, the machine is de¬
signed instead to read, with laser ener¬
gy, information encoded onto silvery
twelve-inch discs, and to translate this
information into a standard color televi¬
sion image on your home screen. These
discs will be marketed much as phono¬
graph records are today, and will sell for
$3 to $10 per album.

Although I was shown flexible discs
marked JAWS, such prime material will
probably be issued in a more substantial
form, with the flimsier format reserved
for throwaways like magazine inserts
and junk mail enclosures. Revolving on
the turntable at 1800 rpm, each thirty-
minute, single-sided recording plays
back some 40,000 images with a four-
track audio complement. The viewer
has a choice of ten forward or reverse
speeds, plus a unique freeze-frame set¬
ting which gives the Philips system a dis¬
tinct advantage over its upcoming rival,
a mechanical system developed by RCA.
Precise frames can be located through a

frame counter which at will prints the
number of each image in the upper left-
hand corner of the screen—a capacity
which should instantly enthrall formalist
film students. Similar freeze-frame de¬
vices on analytical 16mm projectors in¬
variably result in films being torn to
shreds, but since there is no physical
contact with the disc here (it is "read" by
the laser), the problem does not arise. A
demonstration showed the image qual¬
ity to be as good as the imaging capacity
of the television set, with the freeze-
frame particularly notable. Rock-steady,
it lacked the wavering and distortion of
tape freezes and avoided the light loss
and possible frame damage of analytical
projectors. The image was of course
much larger than that of any 16mm li¬

programming. As Philips and MCA con¬
trol the manufacturing and marketing of
both consoles and discs, effectively
monopolizing the entire medium, it is in
their interest as antitrust insurance to
open their disc-producing facilities to all
comers. This would become feasible on
runs of 10,000 copies or more, with cost
per disc for this quantity running about
forty cents. When consoles are wide¬
spread enough, this should produce an
eclectic range of releases in educational,
avant garde, pornographic, and other
special interest categories. The Disco-
Vision promotional material speaks
warmly of parallels to inexpensive
means of book and magazine publish¬
ing. In other words, for $4000 Stan Brak-
hage could have 10,000 copies of his

brary reader, and presented a true single
frame, which the Steenbeck and similar
viewers are incapable of.

The union of MCA with Philips on this
project supplies the initial programming
with which Disco-Vision will be fueled.
Now a fabulously successful entertain¬
ment conglomerate, MCA not only con¬
trols Universal but owns the pre-1948
Paramount library and a string of suc¬
cessful television series—all of which it
intends to tap into. New material is
planned for production as well, and a
certain amount of educational material
(from MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS to
RAYMOND BURR DISCUSSES YOUR LEGAL
RIGHTS) will also be issued, but initially
the big push will be into entertainment

newest work printed up. If he sold di¬
rectly to students and other filmmakers
(not to mention schools, libraries, and
museums) for as little as $5 a disc, only
800 sales would be needed to break even.
The possibility of disseminating his work
widely would for the first time become a
reality.

Of course, none of this can succeed un¬
less distribution of the players is both
rapid and widespread. The combination
of big-time entertainment and fluid
film-study capacity should make the sys¬
tem attractive at the outset to schools, li¬
braries, bars, and other places of public
assembly. After this, marketing to indi¬
viduals should progress in a pattern sim¬
ilar to the growth of television twenty to

38 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

thirty years ago, and the explosion in
music packaging that began in the Six¬
ties. And the parallels with the record
industry are clear: while this is primarily
a visual system, the four-track capacity,
coupled with the nearly indefinite life of
the discs (no skips, scratches, or hiss)
makes it ideal for taking over that market
as well, with a video component thrown
in, if need be. If you can buy the new
Elton John with video for practically the
same price as the old fashioned album,
the rush to the new system could ap¬
proach stampede proportions—or so the
MCA executives hope.

B ut since this is basically an informa¬
tion storage and retrieval system
there are possibilities here far beyond
mere video programming. The informa¬
tion density of Disco-Vision is infinitely
greater than microfilm or microfiche,
and, unlike these systems' machines,
readers for Disco-Vision will be widely
located in private homes. The New York
Public Library could publish its entire
special collections book catalogues on a
single disc, and interested students
could own a copy for the price of a refer-
ence book. Archival material from
around the world could be disseminated
cheaply and easily. Scientific abstracts,
business records, telephone directories,
the FBI fingerprint files, and a host of
other material might be similarly han¬
dled, the ability to locate instantly any
given frame making all of this practical
and convenient. The life of such a disc is
said to be indefinite, and while nothing
lasts forever, the plastic-sealed metal
plate would seem to have a distinct ad¬
vantage over film, tape, and most kinds
of paper.

Surprisingly, MCA's Disco-Vision lit¬
erature does not as yet stress sports pro¬
gramming, but arrangements are cer¬
tainly under way. It was, after all,
closed-circuit football, basketball, and
hockey that helped most cable channels
win their initial customers, and the pat¬
tern could be similar here. The ability to
replay and slo-mo at will an Ali-Frazier
fight, or key moments from past Super
Bowls, could be quite an inducement.
The Disco-Vision viewer can play with
all the video gadgets at the command of a
Wide World of Sports director (save
changes of camera position), an active
capacity viewers have never before
shared.

What the widespread introduction of
such inexpensive home entertainment
will do to its movie-theater (and even
broadcast television) competition is pure
conjecture. For the past thirty years thea¬
ter owners have seen their attendance
figures whittled away (so they feel) by
increasing broadcast and cable television
competition. Will Disco-Vision be the
last straw in breaking the public's
theater-going habit? Will even estab¬

lished patterns of network viewing fi¬
nally be affected?

I asked some of these questions to
Disco-Vision's David Lipton, who gave
the same answers that theater men have
been hearing all along from television
interests: people don't go to the movies
anymore just to see a movie—they go to
get out of the house. Disco-Vision will
have no effect on theater-goers because
it is basically an at-home entertainment,
and people looking for an excuse to leave
the house will still get up and go. If I
were a theater owner I would not take
heart at this. In 1947 audiences had their
deep-rooted going-out habits changed
dramatically by a new medium, and in
1977 the same could happen again, espe¬
cially with the ability to replay that last
shark attack over and over and over.
Then again, perhaps those to be hit har¬
dest by Disco-Vision will be the porno
theaters—a not unpleasant prospect
with some logic behind it.

Or consider these possibilities. What
will happen to 16mm collectors—
especially those dealing in the newest
and most popular material—with thou¬
sands of dollars tied up in hot collec¬
tions? What will you be able to sell your
used Eastmancolor print of THE STING for
if the non-colordegradable Disco-Vision
copies are going for $10? What about the
out-of-print market? Say MCA issues
COBRA WOMAN and it bombs; when they
drop it from the catalogue, will Maria
Montez collectors drive the price of o.p.
copies into three figures? Remember that
there is no way to effectively pirate these
discs (except for the costly and inefficient
alternative of copying them on video¬
tape). Bootleg copies of the VERTIGO
soundtrack album severely depressed
the market value of the out-of-print orig¬
inals recently, but that could not happen
with this system. How would libraries
handle rental requests? Remember that
unlike phono discs, these video discs are
not affected by scratches, fingerprints, or
anything short of a hammer. And what
about combining Disco-Vision with
something like the seven-foot Advent
screen?

It seems certain that by 1984 we will
have seen the successful introduction of
a new technology which combines ele¬
ments of broadcasting, recording, and
publishing. How it will affect these other
media, what the attitude of federal reg¬
ulators might be, and how consumers
will react—all this is open to question.
Will the video millennium finally arrive,
as millions of viewers are freed to seek
out their own interests and avoid the
lowest-common-denominator psychol¬
ogy of broadcasting? Or will the nation
finally turn into a sea of stay-at-home
zombies, locked even more firmly into a
symbiotic relationship to their cathode
tube? A year from now we should begin
to get some answers.

Cutl

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FILM COMMENT 39

Monroe Stahr (Robert DeNiro) watches his own movie (with Ingrid Boulting as Kathleen Moore).

H0I ofIfwOOD

UNDERm™

Elia Kazan on THE LAST TYCOON
interviewed by Charles Silver and Mary Corliss

The melancholic tone of THE LAST TYCOON may seem at
first glance to grant the film's authorship to F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Harold Pinter. Elia Kazan always saw his
screenwriters as vital collaborators rather than as adver¬
saries; he is most generous in crediting Pinter with giving
shape to the film, and modest in making any claims for
auteurship. But Kazan's career-long passions and preoc¬
cupations are still apparent—in the film, guiding Robert
DeNiro to a superb performance as Monroe Stahr, and in
this interview, as he expresses his satisfaction with THE
LAST TYCOON and his outrage at the recent wave of

“bloodletting" action movies.

He spent much of our hour with him pacing around his
Manhattan office, his restless intelligence leading him
through energetic meditations and remembrances.
Though he now considers himself a novelist who occa¬
sionally directs movies, it's hard to think of Kazan con¬
fined to a typewriter and a blank page that never talks
back. He would seem to need the industrious chaos of a
movie set as much as ever—and to agree with others that
the movies, in this age of paralysis and turmoil, still need
Kazan.—M.C.

40 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

T here's the question of authorship on
THE LAST TYCOON. You came to the
project fairly late and you've said that
you didn't change any of Harold Pinter's
dialogue.

Mike Nichols and Harold and Sam
Spiegel had done the basic script, which
I haven't changed. I was writing a book,
and having trouble with it. When you get
stuck on a book, it's a terrible situation.
You've spent months and months on
this, and you realize it may never work.
So just on that day Sam called me and
said, "Do you want to read THE LAST TY¬
COON? Mike and I have busted up on it."
I read it, and I liked it, and I did it. That's
all, that's how that happened. Mike
contributed a lot—the idea of opening in
an Italian place with that shooting and all
that, that was his idea. Of course,
Harold's very capable, and Spiegel is a
hard worker.

I did make some changes: the walking
into the soundstage at the end, which
somebody called an evasion. Pauline
Kael saw that as a proof that the film was
empty, but I agree with Frank Rich [of
the New York Post ] who said that it was
absolutely apt. Rich says that Stahr was
engulfed in his environment finally, and
that's where the moguls die. They don't
break away and jump off a cliff like the
old Greeks used to do. They get engulfed
in their environment; they go lower and
lower. I mean, Thalberg kept coming
back to the picture business; he didn't
escape it. Anyway, I made some contri¬
butions, but it's not like a film that I pro¬
duced or wrote or something like that.
It's Harold Pinter's script!

Were you pleased that his script adhered so
closely to the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel?

Well, they made that decision, and I
thought it was the right decision be¬
cause, honestly, I thought that Edmund
Wilson's notes of what he thought Fitz¬
gerald meant to do—since I write novels
myself I know that you make structural
plans that you do not follow, because
when you get right down to it you say,
"Well, that's just mechanics." Fitzgerald
would not have the stuff about the
airplane blowing up, or the union. He
doesn't give a shit about the union
struggles. I think Sam, Harold, and Mike
probably realized that and said, "Let's
stick to what he actually wrote."

Now, he would have rewritten this,
too, because he starts the book off with
Cecilia narrating, and he drops that. In
the end he could not have had Cecilia
narrating at all. Cecilia, by the way, is a
phony character in the book because she
doesn't have the intelligence or the in¬
sights of a nineteen-year-old girl. She
has Fitzgerald's sensitivity, Fitzgerald's
intelligence. So we had to do something
with it. Dear old John Simon [of New
York], who's a very bright guy, says we
lost that character—but, we didn't lose a
damn thing. We had to do something

with her. To me, the way Cecilia is now,
she's a candidate to be a Beverly Hills
housewife who marries an agent, makes
him even a bigger agent, throws big par¬
ties that she plans meticulously. She be¬
comes famous for them. Then fucks the
chauffeur. Finally, joins the Roman
Catholic Church. I feel compassion for
the girl. I feel she's in a trap. She's in a
place where that's the only life she'll
have.

Will Cecilia know that she once had a fine
moment in her life when she was in love with
Stahr?

Well, I think so, don't you? I think her
love as depicted in the picture is ex¬
tremely idealistic and very winning.
Theresa Russell looks like a child, and
she also looks like a dowager at the same
time. That's why I cast her. She never
acted before, you know; she trains
horses.

Are you pleased with Ingrid Boulting's
performance as Kathleen Moore?

It's not a matter of being pleased or
not. Yes, I was, because she accom¬
plished what I wanted to do. I always
thought of Kathleen as an apparitional
figure, not a real person—someone to
whom he could attach his romanticism.
She's not a human figure. I never meant
her to be like an ordinary girl. She's been
whipped, and she's full of a mysterious
pain. He looks at her, and he sees there
that same mysterious pain his wife had,
and he puts on her a lot of things that are
not true. She's not like what he makes
her. So, when her real person comes out,
he doesn't know what the hell to do. She
says, "I don't want to marry you; I don't
want to be with you; I don't want your
life." That's the real girl coming out, and
he can't understand that. He doesn't
deal with it because he's built her up into
this romantic image. That's what I was
trying to get over. That's not likable or
unlikable. It's a person; it's a Fitzgerald
person. Make sense or not?

It does. Fitzgerald also says in the notes
that the one attractive quality that she had
was that she did not depend on Stahr , and he
seemed to like that , since he was surrounded
by people who really drained him dry every
day.

Don't you find in your experience
that there is a certain type of man who
gets more ardent when he is rejected,
or when you don't come back as strong
as he comes back? Girls know that, so
they play it cool.

So you think that Ingrid Boulting had the
right look?

And feel, too. When you look at her
you say she's someone from outer
space. Listen, you put an ordinary girl
up on top of that figure that's coming
down in the flood, and you think,
"What the fuck is she doing up there?
How did she get on the lot in the first
place? If she doesn't like movies, what
is she doing on the lot? How did she

come in—followed the trucks? Bull¬
shit!" But you put her up there, you
say, "Yeah, I guess she would. I don't
know where the hell she came from, but
maybe she just materialized." That's
what I was trying to get at.

It's been suggested that she looks like both
Zelda and Sheilah Graham. Was there any
intent in either case?

Not intent, but I was pleased to
notice that. Well, Ingrid's a dancer and
does modeling. She dances all the time.

In that sense she's like Zelda.

H ow much casting was done before you
came in?

I suggested Robert DeNiro. I felt sure,
and I took Sam by the hand, and I took
him up to DeNiro who was staying in
Francis Coppola's suite in the Sherry-
Netherland, and I introduced them. And
I said, "Jesus, this is the guy, this is the
guy." And, when I think about it, I was
right.

How would you compare working with
DeNiro to working with Brando when he was
DeNiro's age?

Well, you can't compare anybody.
Every actor that ever lived is different,
and you never work with anybody the
same way. Bobby is more meticulous
and more hardworking. He's very im¬
aginative. He's very precise. He figures
everything out both inside and outside.
He has good emotion. He's a character
actor: everything he does he calculates.
In a good way, but he calculates, just
how he sits, what his suits are, what ring
is where, the eyeglasses, everything is
very exact. He's the only actor I've ever
known who called me up on Friday night
after we got through shooting and said,
"Let's work tomorrow and Sunday to¬
gether." He's the hardest working actor I
ever met and one of the best guys I ever
met in show business.

Brando is like something else, you
know—mysterious. You don't know
where the hell he gets his ideas. He's re¬
ally very intuitive. He's very emotional,
very subterranean; in a sense, he's more
brilliant. Brando kept surprising me/
Brando does something that is unique of
all the actors I've known. You tell him
something, and in the middle of your
telling it to him he'll walk away and say,
"All right, OK." And then he'll do it, and
he'll do it better than you said. He'll do
something you didn't expect. And what
his walking away means is that "I've
thought of it, and I've thought of some¬
thing better than what you said, you
bastard." So Brando does more unex¬
pected things, but I wouldn't say he's a
better actor than DeNiro—he's a differ¬
ent kind of actor.

How much of this performance, without
taking anything away from DeNiro, would
you say you brought out? How much of it is
your idea?

FILM COMMENT 41

His! I would tell him a lot of things. But
with a good actor, you can tell him a lot
and you have to watch what he latches
on to and what he does not latch on to.
He picked from what I told him; 'cause I
can talk about that character a long time.
He picked out the right things; he
worked hard on them, and I would say
he contributed an awful lot. I'm a di¬
rector who does work with actors. So, I
did contribute, but I would say that
anything anyone might praise me for,
they should first mention Bobby because
it's Bobby's performance. He takes on a
character. You know that old cliche
about how an actor becomes the person.
He'll stay off the set until you're ready to
shoot—I don't know what the hell he
does. He gets there early. He works hard
by himself. Bobby's wonderful! He's a
’wonderful fellow. I don't know how that
fellow got to be that way. He's a marvel¬
ous man.

1 had the crazy idea that DeNiro as Stahr
looked a little bit like you in your youth.

A lot of people said that. We looked at
pictures of Irving Thalberg, but it was a
little bit different than that. It was more
to make him like a properly brought-up
middle-class Jewish intellectual who was
in a flamboyant business. He's got that
look of a proper boy. Moss Hart used to
have that look when he was young, too. I
worked with Moss once on a picture, and
I got to know him well; Moss and Thal¬
berg were both romantic and good busi¬
nessmen. I wanted the audience to feel
that Stahr could manage the studio well,
but, at the same time, he could get lost in
a dream that was false with a woman. I
also wanted him to appear inept sexual¬
ly. Pinter has a stage direction which
says, "He trembles." Well, when Kath¬
leen takes off her clothes, I couldn't
show him trembling, or it would make
you laugh, but he does reach for a post.
You remember where he sort of reaches
back, and he can't find the post, and he
looks terrible; he looks frightened to
death. Some people thought he was im¬
potent because of that, but a minute later
he isn't.

Did you find Jeanne Moreau exciting or
difficult to work with?

Oh, Jesus, she's a complete pro. I
mean, she's a director. You have to say
three words to her; she's way ahead of
you. She's as smart a person as I've ever
met. I liked her a lot. It wasn't like
working with anyone mysterious. It was
more like working with a European star
where you have a discussion, and you
don't have to help them accomplish it
which is the way the English actors are.
They go and do it; they do it in their own
terms, and that's the end of it. They are
different from ours. We have a tradi¬
tion—especially since I started with
Brando and all that bunch—of the di¬
rector helping a lot and seeing them
through a lot and making a lot of sugges¬

tions. But with English or continental
actors, they're supposed to be trained to
achieve the director's goal—that was the
case with her.

I had never met Jeanne. So I thought,
Jesus Christ, I'm going to show her up as
being a faded star—maybe I'll have diffi¬
culty with that. Not at all—she got the
idea way ahead of me. And when she
says "How do I look on the screen?", I
think that's a terrific closeup of her, and
she's perfectly aware of how bad she
looks. She doesn't look well in the pic¬
ture; she looks like a faded out star. But
when she saw it she said, "It's a great
picture; you made a great picture." She
flattered me more than anyone else; I
was real pleased with her praise.

Did you cast Tony Curtis as Rodriguez?

No, that was Spiegel's idea. Dana
Andrews was my idea. We all contri¬
buted. Spiegel's very good. He's an ex¬
cellent producer. He cares. He's a des¬
perate carer. By God, he's a hard trier
when he wants something. He sweats,
waiting for the rushes. He goes to see
them, and when they're bad, his face
gets white, and when they're good, he
just glows. Against the indifference of
the people who run the lots today—the
lawyers, the agents, the former agents,
the businessmen, the budgetmakers—
Old Sam's in there. He dies every day.
He's adorable. He's the last tycoon—
the sonofabitch!

S ome people thought the filmclips within
the film were unsuccessful or anachro¬
nistic—the CASABLANCA parody for
example.

I didn't try either to rest on nostalgia or
to make this very definitely a certain
period. I didn't say that it zs 1938.1 didn't
play on nostalgia: oh, those were the
good old days or how romantic. I didn't
because I don't believe that. And I also
believe the story has something univer¬
sal. One thing about America is we're
both romantic and we're expeditious—
we're good business people, and we're
also dreamers. So, I thought it had uni¬
versal meaning—that's why I didn't nail
it down or anchor it to a period. I, there¬
fore, felt a certain liberty not to make

them a parody of CASABLANCA, which
I'm not interested in doing—that would
be terrible. But I have elements that re¬
mind you of CASABLANCA but also of
other things. The flashback I think that's
best is the first one that's played in
black-and-white and suddenly switches
to color, and she says, "I want to do it
again. I want to do it again." That, to me,
gets the period better than any of the
other stuff.

The Hollywood that comes through in the
film—does that reflect any of your attitudes
toward the period?

The silken murder—the congenial
murder. The last reel's my favorite reel in
the picture. I love when they fire him.

Producer Sam Spiegel, Jeanne Moreau, director Elia Kazan.

42 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

and it's all done so politely, so nicely.
Meantime, he's out; they're in; and the
deals are being rearranged; they've had
meetings with lawyers. They always
have these pre-meeting meetings. That
silken murder—that's part of it. The
other thing I think is very telling is the
music in what you call the CASABLANCA
scene, really heavy portentous music. I
think that really heavy portentous
music. I think that really helps that scene
a lot.

The scene that's most Hollywood of
all—that comes from my memory, that I
put in—comes after that scene is over
when you have this medium long shot of
them all just sitting there in the projec¬
tion room, and nobody says a damn

word; a few people clear their throats.
They're all waiting for Stahr to speak
first. They're just sitting there. I re¬
member that so well in Zanuck's projec¬
tion room, and I extended that. As a
matter of fact, now that I see it, I wish I
kept it longer; it could have gone on for
twenty more seconds. Until he commits
himself, they're afraid to. That's the
most Hollywood scene of all in the pic¬
ture.

I imagine that, when you were out there as
an actor in 1936 you must have been some¬
what estranged from that.

I was a hard-working kid. I was sitting
at home trying to write screenplays. I
never went out with those people.

Another thing that's typical is the loneli¬
ness of when he comes home, and the
Filipino butler is there and there's no one
at home. There were big shots like that,
but when you got to know them, they
had no life at all except their work. When
you see him in bed, he's surrounded
with scripts—that's another thing that I
remember seeing.

Stahr reads the letter from Kathleen saying
that she's engaged to be married, but you
don't yet know what the letter says, and then
you have her voice-over reading as he goes up
the stairs. Was that your idea?

No, that was Harold. . . he's damm
good. He's a remarkable intelligence.

Was he on the set at all?

No, He was in England, but I swore to

him. I said to him—it wasn't Fitzgerald
that I was reverential toward, it was
Harold—I said to him that I wouldn't
change any of his dialogue. And I didn't
change one syllable of it. I found a way to
stage it all.

You're a novelist, and yet your fidelity was
toward Pinter's screenplay rather than
Fitzgerald's novel.

Well, I don't think novelists are im¬
mediately screenwriters, or even par¬
ticularly qualified to be screenwriters.
The compression in a screenplay is its
own special compression. It's not like the
theater, either. Especially with
Harold—he suggests so much, and they
talk about the pauses. There are no
pauses in that thing. At every pause

something is happening. The inner ac¬
tion is continuous. You're waiting to see
when are they going to get down to what
the hell is really on their minds. That's
not a pause—it's an evasion of confron¬
tation. And then when the confrontation
comes, they can't say it. I think that tells
more than anything. Anybody who liked
it didn't complain about the pace.

T here are a couple of crucial scenes in the
novel that are left out of the film. In one
scene, Stahr meets the black man on the beach
when thegrunion are coming in.

We almost put that scene in. We were
right on the verge of doing that. I don't
know if it was the grunion or what the
hell it was. What we did, though, was we
put a line in her mouth. He says, "Do
you go to pictures?" She says, "Not
much." He says, "Well, you should."
She says, "Why should I?" He says,
"Films give people what they want."
And she has an excellent line: "What you
want." Which is right down to the bone.
It isn't what they want—it's been proved
it's not—but it's what he wants, his vis¬
ion. He's giving his vision of the world.
That's what we did instead of the grun¬
ion.

The other missing scene is the last meeting
between Kathleen and Stahr where Stahr de¬
cides whether he should go away with her to¬
night or wait. You never have this conscious
decision-making process in the film. I don't
know if there is a way of "making pictures" of
this.

I think that's strictly Harold's way of
looking at life. I'll tell you a story. When I
began to work with Harold I went to
England. We worked a little bit, and I
said, "Gee, why isn't this confrontation
more upfront?" And he said, "I think it's
there." And I said, "No, it's like it's all
happening underwater." And he said,
"Isn't that where things happen?" Now,
think about it in your own life. You make
a decision to do something important.
Are you aware that you're making it at a
particular moment? Isn't that often just a
convention of drama—that it's upfront?
Aren't decisions made and then you hear
about them from your inner radio sta¬
tion? I mean, Harold's got a point, hasn't
he? It's his view of life; it's his way of
seeing things.

You would write it more directly?

My own habit is more direct, to ar¬
ticulate, but in my own personal life I'm
sure I do. Because I am like most people,
I avoid confrontation until it cannot be
avoided any longer.

Stahr says, "I don't want to lose you," but
he does nothing to prevent that from hap¬
pening. He doesn't really say, "You're mine,
I'm taking you; you're going to worry me back
to life ."

That's what I would do. I would say," I
don't care about all your problems.
We're not only driving up on the road,
but we're going to keep going." I think I

THE MOVIE PREMIERE. (From left:) Tony Curtis, Leslie Curtis, Ray Milland, Robert DeNiro, Jeanne
Moreau, Robert Mitchum, Theresa Russell.

FILM COMMENT 43

would do that—I have done that—but
I'm not sure that Irving Thalberg would
do it. And I'm not sure that the man the
script is redly about, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
would do it. I'm not sure that one of his *
heroes would do it. When you read Ten¬
der Is the Night , everything is happening
without a direct confrontation. It's a spe¬
cial way of dealing with the problems of
life. That's the way Flarold felt, and I re¬
spect it.

Ultimately , it has to he tragic if you don't
take action at the moment when it's desper¬
ately needed.

Don't you think that at the end of the
film he's had a terrific loss? The line
where he says, "I was just making
pictures"—isn't that full of self-scorn? I
think that's the best line in the picture.
When you think about it, he doesn't read
it in any mean way to himself, but it's full
of scorn. "That's what I've done all my
life, and I've got such a habit of looking at
things as though they were pictures, and
in my own life it's become that."

You didn't feel constrained in your direct¬
ing hy the fact that for Pinter things do hap¬
pen underwater.

People think of me like ON THE WATER¬
FRONT all the time, but actually if you
think about the stuff I've done, a lot of it
is very muted. I'm really not a noisy
man, although some of my films have
been noisy. Even if you look at on the
WATERFRONT, what scenes do people re¬
member most from it? What's good
about the picture is the tenderness in the
middle of the violence.

People send me a lot of scripts, but I
will not do a sadistic script. I will not do a
script about bloodletting. I will not do a
script about hate. I will not add to the
violence. I will not say violence is good. I
will not say violence is an expression of
our time. When you meet the people
who make these bloodletting pictures,
you find they are people of intelligence
and culture—and they make pictures
which release the worse things in soci¬
ety. I'll never do that. I think a filmmaker
has a certain moral duty. I think that he's
got to say, "Look, Mankind is perfect-
able or is good. Men can be good." Also I
just don't like to do it. They're all tricks
anyway—it's just mechanics. In ON the
waterfront we didn't do that. We had a
terrible fight which I hid partly behind
the wall of that little house. I didn't show
it. When you make entertainment out of
violence, when you say what fun it is to
smash somebody in the nose—take
Silver's glasses and throw him on the
ground and stamp him out and stick
your fist in his mouth and kick him in the
balls—well, shit on that!

I think a picture like THE LAST TYCOON
is a test of a critic. I don't think I'm being
tested in it, or Harold's being tested in it,
and certainly Fitzgerald's not being
tested. But it's a test of a critic's sensitiv¬
ity; for they basically, I think, have be¬

come debased, as the audience has be¬
come debased. They think that there's
got to be a piece of violence every so of¬
ten. There's a new technique in pictures
which was started by Francis Coppola.
The prime example of it is MARATHON
man where every five minutes on the
second there's some bloodletting or
somebody's guts are thrown out on the
floor. And the picture goes along—
nothing's happening, nothing's
happening—and the audience says,
"Jeez, I wonder who's going to get killed
now. . ." Five minutes! Gow! whew!
bang bang! Across the hall, falling out
the fucking window, and everything
goes along and every thing's smooth—
that's the new technique. And the audi¬
ence! I went to the Loew's State to see
this damn MARATHON MAN, and when I
went in there was about a five-minute
wait before the picture started, and I
swear to God it smelled like a zoo at
feeding time. The people wanted it.
There was a hunger for violence; they
have their pent-up violence inside.
People are furious. Society's got them
nuts!

Has your attitude toward adapting novels
changed since you began writing your own
novels?

I don't know. What's interesting to
me was that to go from novel-writing to
filmmaking was not hard at all. But to
go from making a film back to novel¬
writing, that was tough. There's
something about the conviviality of a
film—we had a damn good unit, all the
actors liked each other, we had a great
time—it's so easy compared with
writing a book. The next thing I'm
going to do after this novel is to write
the followup to AMERICA, AMERICA,
which is my favorite film. When you
start getting ambivalent material, it's
hard to be perfect. I don't feel life so
clearly—I don't even feel it as an un-
ambivalent thing.

Do you admire Fitzgerald as a novelist?

I admire him line by line, little para¬
graph by paragraph. I think he's
brilliant—especially this book. The
things he observes and the way he says
them, he's great. It's not a finished
book. Do I admire his vision as a
whole? Well, I'm interested in it, but
you know, I don't know truly, if you
put the squeeze on any artist in any
field, whether he really is very in¬
terested in anyone else's work. I do es¬
teem other artists. Jean Renoir is like a
god to me. He's the greatest director
that ever lived, for my taste. I esteem
him, but interest is something else. The
more you write your own stuff, the
more you're interested in your own vi¬
sion, and you hold onto that hard. You
say, "I don't want to be diverted. I
don't want to become someone else's
artistic servant. I want to hold onto my
own vision."

Brendan Gill on
THE LAST TYCOON

T he movie that has been made from
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last
Tycoon is a failure, and it fails on so
grand a scale that we are unable to find a
discreet path around it, pretending it
doesn't exist. Because everyone con¬
cerned with it evidently hoped to create a
masterpiece, its failure has led to a curi¬
ous commotion among a few reviewers;
indirectly admitting that something ap¬
pears to have gone wrong with the pic¬
ture, they argue that if serious movie¬
goers wish the opportunity to continue
seeing "literate" movies, they had damn
well better grit their teeth and find in THE
LAST TYCOON more of value than it con¬
tains. A rum argument, irrelevant to art,
and one that I have no doubt is often
aired in hell, where it belongs.

S am Spiegel, Elia Kazan, and Harold
Pinter—respectively, the producer,
the director, and the author of the
screenplay of THE LAST TYCOON —have
made interesting movies in the past, and
it may be instructive to speculate on
where they have gone wrong in the
present production. To begin with, they
have radically altered the nature of the
book. Whether consciously or uncon¬
sciously, in the course of wrestling with
the structural difficulties of an un¬
finished novel (Fitzgerald died of a heart
attack as he was reaching what Edmund
Wilson, his literary executor, estimated
was the half-way point in the manu¬
script) they fell back upon the certainties
of a finished novel. Again and again in
the movie of the LAST TYCOON we hear
echoes of The Great Gatsby, and these
echoes are very far from what Fitzgerald
had in mind when he created Monroe
Stahr.

Unlike Gatsby, Stahr is not a man
ruthlessly in pursuit of a romantic ideal.
Instead of being an outsider in a world of
"old" money, he is an insider in a world
of "new" money, and it would never
occur to him to try to purchase his heart's
desire by parties in blue gardens "among
the whisperings and the champagne and
the stars." He is past having to purchase
anything; indeed, he is almost past
wishing to possess anything. He is ready
to die, not through some grotesque mis¬
chance, like Gatsby, but of his own
choice, through exhaustion. And this in
part because he has already had his
Daisy Buchanan—Minna Davis, the
most important movie actress of her day.
He had won her early, as he had won
every other prize in Hollywood, and
though she had loved him, he had begun
to love her only as she lay dying. (Like

44 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Robert DeNiro and Ingrid Boulting.

his hero, Fitzgerald at the time he was
writing The Last Tycoon was "half in love
with easeful death." The strain of being
emotionally as well as financially over¬
committed was almost unendurable;
with his literary reputation at its nadir
and his screenwriting career in jeopardy,
he struggled to remain sober and bring
off the most ambitious artistic feat of his
life. He was forty-four and he felt a hun¬
dred.) Stahr was drawn to Kathleen
Moore because she resembled Minna;
she was elusive but by no means unat¬
tainable—she had slept with a number of
men, and Fitzgerald suggests that she
was more eager for, and in greater need
of, sexual activity than Stahr was.

I n his screenplay, Pinter puts much
emphasis upon the relationship be¬
tween Stahr and Kathleen, and I sup¬
pose that from a box-office point of view
this was inevitable, but Fitzgerald had
come a long way from supposing that an
affair like Gatsby's and Daisy Buchan¬
an's could serve as a sufficient metaphor
for those joustings among social classes
in America that are the underlying
theme of the earlier novel. Fitzgerald
was a young man when he wrote The
Great Gatsby and a touchingly ignorant
one. He needed a Nick Carraway as his
narrator in order to place himself at a
convenient distance from Gatsby and
Wolfsheim, about whose crooked ac¬
tivities he had little first-hand knowl¬
edge. When he came to write The Last
Tycoon , he was determined to get the
facts straight. He wanted to tell precisely
how the Byzantine mechanism of Hol¬
lywood worked, and he set about doing
his homework with exceptional consci¬
entiousness. He based Stahr on Irving
Thalberg, the boy wonder of MGM, who
married the actress Norma Shearer and
who died young, and he took pains to
find out how Thalberg manipulated the
many puppets under him—bankers,
producers, directors, screenwriters, and
actors and actresses. Few of the puppets

could survive for long the wear and tear
of their incessant danglings, and if Fitz¬
gerald had lived to complete The Last
Tycoon he would have provided it with a
violent and bloody climax. In the movie,
the climax consists of one of those ges¬
tures of aesthetic ambiguity that are in¬
tended to convey to us that something of
importance has either just happened or
is just about to happen: bereft of his girl
and his power, Stahr wanders alone into
the darkness of a vast sound studio.

N orman Mailer has said in conversa¬
tion that he can hardly remember a
movie that seemed to have as few ques¬
tions to raise as the last tycoon. What
is the movie about ? Why has anyone trou¬
bled to make it? It goes on scene after
scene, but to what purpose? The screen¬
play is solid and laborious, and the
Pinter dialogue, which in his plays and
previous screenplays is so eerie and pro¬
vocative, issues with lifeless decorum
from the mouths of the characters. Hard
as it may be to believe, here is a fair sam¬
ple:

"Listen."

A long pause.

"What?"

A long pause.

"Nothing."

Along pause.

I f the movie had chosen to make clear
that Stahr was doomed to die within
six months (a fact known to his doctors,
if not to him), then an interesting
dramatic question would have been
raised: how does a man behave who is
dying and who has just fallen in love?
Thomas Mann and Hemingway and a
number of other writers have found this
an admirable subject; too bad that it was
glossed over in the present production.

S till, even if Spiegel, Kazan, and
Pinter had set about making THE LAST
TYCOON more or less as Fitzgerald wrote
it, I suspect that the movie would have

failed for another reason—its casting,
which is to say its miscasting. Fitz¬
gerald's Hollywood was predominantly
Jewish, and the novel continuously re¬
turns to this point. Stahr was a bright
Jewish boy from Erie, Pennsylvania;
Robert DeNiro, with his Italianate good
looks, is just wrong for the part but is
such an excellent actor and is so intent
upon creating something of value on the
screen that we watch him with undi¬
minished fascination from first to last.
But what are we to make of Ray Milland,
with his classical Anglo-Saxon features
(now gone to fat), as the hard-driving
New York lawyer Fleischacker? Or of
Morgan Farley, who looks as if he were
straight out of Burke's Peerage and who
here plays old Marcus, the quintessential
Lasky-Zukor movie mogul? Robert Mit-
chum is also miscast in the role of Pat
Brady, a wily and sensual Irish scoun¬
drel, bent upon destroying Stahr; Mit-
chum's rocklike countenance reveals lit¬
tle more than a contemptuous resigna¬
tion to his professional duties. (Unlike
Mitchum, Jack Nicholson as a union or¬
ganizer and Tony Curtis as a screen-
lover who has become impotent throw
themselves with ardor into their small
roles. One guesses that Curtis's role was
intended to be much bigger than it is and
that a regrettable portion of it has ended
up on the cutting room floor.)

As for the two leading women's roles
in the movie, the choices made strike me
as incomprehensible. Ingrid Boulting, a
former model, is "introduced" in the
picture—introduced and, it is to be
hoped, said a quick goodbye to. She
wanders through the part of Kathleen as
if lobotomized, turning her great, dim
eyes and tiny teeth in whatever direction
she has been instructed to turn them but
conveying no emotion whatever.
Theresa Russell plays Cecilia Brady, a
Bennington College girl who has grown
up a Hollywood princess and who, in the
novel, serves as the equivalent of Nick
Carraway. Miss Russell is stocky and has
a flat, untrained voice; she is altogether
out of touch with the nature of those
Fitzgerald heroines of whom he once
noted with pride, "they were all so warm
and full of promise."

F itzgerald wrote at the top of his last
draft of the first chapter of The Last
Tycoon: "Rewrite from mood." Novels
can be dealt with in that fashion; movies
cannot. Moreover, when a movie suc¬
ceeds, several later versions are likely to
come into existence. When a movie fails,
it almost certainly fails forever. It is sad
for us to lose The Last Tycoon as a movie
— all the more so because of our having
earlier lost -The Great Gatsby and Tender Is
the Night. Perhaps it will be best if
"Babylon Revisited" and the rest of the
Fitzgerald crown jewels are left to blaze
inviolably upon the page. %

FILM COMMENT 45

"I MIGHT AS WELL NEVER'VE BEEN BORN/' James Stewart, the middle-class savior of Bedford Falls, in Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.

IDBObOGY GENRE, AUTEUR

by Robin Wood

Last summer Robin Wood delivered three lectures at the National Film Theatre in London, in conjunction with the
publication of his collection of essays. Personal Visions . Film COMMENT published the first lecture in the November-
December issue. The third lecture, "as I wanted to give it," appears below.

"The truth lies not in one dream but in
many."

E ach theory of film so far has insisted
on its own particular polarization.
Montage theory enthrones editing
as the essential creative act at the ex¬
pense of other aspects of film; Bazin's
Realist theory, seeking to right the bal¬
ance, merely substitutes its own imbal¬
ance, downgrading montage and artifice;
the revolutionary theory centered in Brit¬
ain on Screen (but today very wide¬
spread) rejects—or at any rate seeks to
"deconstruct"—Realist art in favor of the
so-called "open text." Auteur theory, in
its heyday, concentrated attention exclu¬
sively on the fingerprints, thematic or
stylistic, of the individual artist; recent at¬
tempts to discuss the complete "filmic
text" have tended to throw out ideas of
personal authorship altogether. Each
theory has, given its underlying position,
its own validity—the validity being de¬
pendent upon, and restricted by, the po¬

sition. Each can offer insights into differ¬
ent areas of cinema and different aspects
of a single film.

I have suggested, in these talks, the de¬
sirability for the critic—whose aim should
always be (to see the work as wholly as
possible, as it is—to be able to draw on the
discoveries and particular perceptions of
each theory, each position, without
committing himself exclusively to any
one. The ideal will not be easy to attain,
and even the attempt raises all kinds of
problems, the chief of which is the valid¬
ity of evaluative criteria that are not sup¬
ported by a particular system. From what,
then, do they receive support? No critic,
obviously, can be free from a structure of
values, nor can he afford to withdraw
from the struggles and tensions of living
to some position of "aesthetic" contem¬
plation. Every critic who is worth reading
has been, on the contrary, very much
caught up in the effort to define values
beyond purely aesthetic ones (if indeed
such things exist). [Yet to "live histori¬

cally" need not entail commitment to a
system or a cause; it can involve, rather,
being alive to the opposing pulls, the ten¬
sions, of one's world^ '

The past two decades have seen a
number of advances in terms of the
opening up of critical possibilities, of
areas of relevance, especially with regard
to Hollywood: the elaboration of auteur
theory in its various manifestations; the
interest in genre; the interest in ideology.

I want tonight tentatively to explore some
of the ways in which these disparate ap¬
proaches to Hollywood movies might
interpenetrate, producing the kind of
synthetic criticism I have suggested might
now be practicable.

In order to create a context within
which to discuss IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
and SHADOW OF A DOUBT, I want to at¬
tempt (at risk of obviousness) some defi¬
nition of what we mean by American
capitalist ideology—or, more specifically,
the values and assumptions so insistently
embodied in and reinforced by the classi-

46 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

caTHollywood cinema. Pressure of time
enforces drastic simplification; the fol¬
lowing list of components is not intended
to be exhaustive or profound, but simply
to make conscious, and present to a dis¬
cussion of the films, concepts with which
we are all perfectly familiar.

1. Capitalism, the right of ownership,
private enterprise, personal initiative; the
settling of the land.

2. The work ethic: the notion that
"honest toil" is in itself and for itself mor¬
ally admirable, this and (1) both validat¬
ing and reinforcing each other. The moral
excellence of work is also bound up with
the necessary subjugation or sublimation
of the libido: "the Devil finds work for idle
hands." The relationship is beautifully
epitomized in the zoo-cleaner's song in
CAT PEOPLE.

"Nothing else to do.

Nothing else to do,

I strayed, went a -courting
'cause I'd nothing else to do."

3. Marriage (legalized heterosexual
monogamy) and family. At once the
further validation of (1) and (2)—the
homestead is built for the Woman, whose
function is to embody civilized values and
guarantee their continuance through her
children—and an extension of the own¬
ership principle to personal relationships
("My house, my wife, my children") in a
male-dominated society.

4a. Nature as agrarianism; the virgin
land as Garden of Eden. A concept into
which, in the Western, (3) tends to be¬
come curiously assimilated (ideology's
function being to "naturalize" cultural as¬
sumptions): e.g., the treatment of the
family in DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK.

4b. Nature as the wilderness, the in-
dians, on whose subjugation civilization
is built; hence by extension the libido, of
which in many westerns the Indians seem
an extension or embodiment (the
searchers).

5. Progress, technology, the city
("New York, New York, it's a wonderful
town," etc.).

6. Success/wealth. A value of which
Hollywood ideology is also deeply
ashamed, so that, while hundreds of
films play on its allure, very few can allow
themselves openly to extol it. Thus its
ideological "shadow" is produced:

7. The Rosebud syndrome. Money
isn't everything; money corrupts; the
poor are happier. A very convenient as¬
sumption for capitalist ideology: the more
oppressed you are, the happier you are
(e.g., the singing "darkies" of A DAY AT
THE RACES, etc.).

8^America as the land where every¬
one actually is/can be happy; hence the
land where all problems are solvable
within the existing system (which may
need a bit of reform here and there but no
radical change). Subversive systems are
assimilated whereverpossible to serve
V the dominant ideologynAndrew Britton,

in a characteristically brilliant article on
Hitchcock's SPELLBOUND, argues that
there even Freudian psychoanalysis be¬
comes an instrument of ideological re¬
pression ^Above all, this assumption
gives us that most striking and persistent
of all classical Hollywood phenomena,
the Happy Ending: often a mere "emer¬
gency exit" (Sirk's phrase) for the spec¬
tator, a barely plausible pretense that the
problems the film has raised are now re¬
solved^ (Hilda crane offers a suitably
blatant example among the hundreds
possible.) .

Out of this list emerge logically two
ideal figures, giving us:

9. The Ideal Male: the virile adven¬
turer, potent, untrammelled man of ac¬
tion.

A 10. The Ideal Female: wife and
/ mother, perfect companion, endlessly
dependable, mainstay of hearth and
\home.

Since these combine into an Ideal
Couple of quite staggering incompatibil¬
ity, each has his/her shadow, giving us:

11. The settled husband/father, de¬
pendable but dull.

f 12. The erotic woman (adventuress,
I gambling lady, saloon "entertainer"),
1 fascinating but dangerous, liable to betray
Mhe hero or turn into a black panther.

TP he most striking fact about this list is |
A that it presents an ideology that, far |
.from being monolithic, is inherently rid- |]
Idled with hopeless contradictions and l
\unresolvable tensions. The work that I
ha ^hepn done so far on genre has tended

to take the various genres as "given' 7 and
"discreTe, and seeks to explicate them/

d girT^F^nTtrrfermyofTn^f sye tcE;~what~~

we need to ask, if ppn rp th^ory-i^ypr to
\be productive, is less What? than Why?
/ We are so used to tneTgenres tnat the

peculiarity of the phenomenon itself has

been loo little noted. The idea I wish to

pul forward is that tne development of

t Ke^;enres~ is roote d m the sort of

ideological contradictions myJ ^neV n<jr

Suggests One impulse may be the at¬
tempt to deny such contradictions by
eliminating one of the opposed terms, or
at least by a process of simplification.

Robert Warshow's seminal essays on
the gangster hero and the Westerner
(still fruitfully suggestive, despite the
obvious objection that he took too little
into account) might be adduced here.
The opposition of gangster film and
western is only one of many possibilities.
All the genres can be profitably
examined in terms of ideological opposi¬
tions, forming a complex interlocking
pattern: small-town family comedy/
sophisticated city comedy; city comedy/
film noir; film noirl small-town comedy,
etc.. It is probable that a genre is
ideologically "pure" (i.e. safe) only in its
simplest, most archetypal, most aes¬
thetically deprived,=and intellectually

contemptible form: Hopalong Cassidy, I
the Andy Hardy comedies. I

The Hopalong Cassidy films (from
which Indians, always a potentially
disruptive force in ideological as well as
dramatic terms, are, in general, signifi¬
cantly absent), for example, seem to de¬
pend on two strategies for their perfect
ideological security: (a) the strict division
of characters into good and evil, with no
"grays"; (b) Hoppy's sexlessness (he
never becomes emotionally entangled),
hence the possibility of evading all the
wandering/settling tensions on which
aesthetically interesting westerns are
generally structured. (An intriguing al¬
ternative: the Ideal American Family of
Roy Rogers/Dale Evans/ Trigger). Shan e
is especially interesting in this connec¬
tion. A deliberate attempt to create an
"archetypal" western, it also represents i
an effort to resolve the major ideological
tensions harmoniously. \

One of the greatest obstacles to any
fruitful theory of genre h as been the ten¬
dency to treat the genres as discrete. An
ideological approach might suggest why
they can't be, however hard they may
appear to try: at b est, they represent dif¬
ferent strategies tor dealing with the
same ideological tensions. For example,

the sma ll-town movie with a contem¬
porary setting should never be divorced
from its historical correlative, the Wejgt -
ern. In the classical Hollywood cinema
motifs cross repeatedly from genre to
genre, as can be made clear by a few
examples. The home/wandering oppo¬
sition that Peter Wollen rightly sees as
central to Ford is not central only to Ford
or even to the Western; it structures a
remarkably large number of American
films covering all genres, from OUT OF
THE PAST to THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE
SHOW BUSINESS. The explicit comparison
of women to cats connects screwball
comedy (BRINGING UP baby), horror film
(CAT PEOPLE), melodrama (RAMPAGE), and
psychological thriller (MARNIE). An
example that brings us to tonight's spe¬
cific topic: notice the way in which the
Potent Male Adventurer, when he enters
the family circle, immediately displaces
his "shadow," the settled husband/
father, in both THE SEARCHERS and
SHADOW OF A DOUBT.

Before we attempt to apply these ideas
to specific films, however, one more
point needs to be especially emphasized:
the presence of ideological tensions in a
movie, though it may give it an interest
beyond Hopalong Cassidy, is not in itself
a reliable evaluative criterion. It seems
probable that artistic value has always
been dependent on the presence—
somewhere, at some stage—of an indi¬
vidual artist:, whatever the function of art
in the particular society, and even when
(as with the Chartres cathedral) one no
longer knows who the individual artists
were. It is only through the mediumship

FILM COMMENT 47

of the individual that ideological ten¬
sions come to particular focus, hence be¬
come of aesthetic as well as sociological
a interest. It can perhaps be argued that
works are of especial interest when (a)
the defined particularities of an auteur
\ interact with specific ideological tensions
and (b) the film is fed from more than one
generic source.

The same basic ideological tensions
operate in both IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and
SHADOW OF A DOUBT: they furnish further
reminders that the home/wandering
antimony is by no means the exclusive
preserve of the Western. Bedford Falls
and Santa Rosa can be seen as the_fron -
tier town seventy or so years on ; they
embody the development of the civiliza¬
tion whose establishment was celebrated
around the same time by Ford in MY
"darling CLEMENTINE. With this relation¬
ship to the Western in the background
(but in Capra's film made succinctly
explicit), the central tension in both films
can be described in terms of genre: the
disturbing influx of film noir into the
world of small-town domestic comedy.

(It is a tension clearly present in CLEMEN- g
TINE as well: the opposition between the g
daytime and night-time Tombstones). £

The strong contrast the two films pre- g
sent testifies to the decisive effect of the o
intervention of a clearly defined artistic ^
personality in an ideological-generic g
structure. Both films have as a central £
ideological project the reaffirmation of
family and small-town values which the
action has called into question. In Cap¬
ra's film this reaffirmation is magnifi¬
cently convincing (but with full ac¬
knowledgment of the suppressions on
which it depends and, consequently, of
its precariousness); in Hitchcock's it is
completely hollow. The very different
emotional effect of the films—the satis¬
fying catharsis and emotional fullness of
the Capra, the "bitter taste" (on which
so many have commented) of the Hitch¬
cock—is very deeply rooted not only
in our response to two opposed di¬
rectorial personalities but in our own
ideological structuring.

O ne of the main ideological and
thematic tensions of ITS A WONDER¬
FUL LIFE is beautifully encapsulated in the
scene in which George Bailey (James
Stewart) and Mary (Donna Reed) smash
windows in a derelict house as a preface
to making wishes. George's wish is that
he shall get the money to leave Bedford
Falls, which he sees as humdrum and
constricting, and travel about the world;
Mary's (not expressed in words, but in
its subsequent fulfillment—confirming
her belief that wishes don't come true if
you speak them) is that she and George
will marry, settle down and raise a fami¬
ly, in the same derelict house, a ruined
shell which marriage-and-family re¬
stores to life.

This tension is developed through the
extended sequence in which George is
manipulated into marrying Mary. His
brother's return home with a wife and a
new job traps George into staying in
Bedford Falls to take over the family
business. With the homecoming cele¬
brations continuing inside the house in
the background, George sits disconso¬
lately on the front porch: we hear a train
whistle, off-screen, to which he
reacts. His mother (the indispensable
Beulah Bondi) comes out and begins
"suggesting" that he visit Mary; he ap¬
pears to make off toward her, screen
right, physically pointed in her direction
by his mother, then reappears and walks
away past Beulah Bondi in the opposite
direction.

This leads him, with perfect
ideological/generic logic, to Violet
(Gloria Grahame). The Violet/Mary op¬
position is an archetypally clear render¬
ing of that central Hollywood female op¬
position that crosses all generic boun¬
daries—as with Susan (Katharine Hep¬
burn) and Alice (Virginia Walker) in
BRINGING UP BABY, Irena (Simone Simon)
and Alice (Jane Randolph) in CAT PEOPLE,
Chihuahua (Linda Darnell) and
Clementine (Cathy Downs) in MY DARL¬
ING CLEMENTINE, Debby (Gloria
Grahame) and Katie (Jocelyn Brando) in
THE BIG HEAT. But Violet (in front of an
amused audience) rejects his poetic in¬

vitation to a barefoot ramble over the
hills in the moonlight; the good-time gal
offers no more solution to the hero's
wanderlust than the wife-mother figure.

So back to Mary, whom he brings to
the window by beating a stick aggres¬
sively against the fence of the neat, en¬
closed front garden—a beautifully pre¬
cise expression of his ambivalent state of
mind, desire to attract Mary's attention
warring with bitter resentment of his
growing entrapment in domesticity.
Mary was expecting him; his mother
phoned her, knowing that George
would end up at her house. Two ideo¬
logical premises combine here: the no¬
tion that the "good" mother always
knows, precisely and with absolute cer¬
titude, the working of her son's mind;
and the notion that the female principle
is central to the continuity of civilization,
that the "weaker sex" is compensated
with a sacred rightness.

Indoors, Mary shows George a car¬
toon she has drawn: George, in cowboy
denims, lassoing the moon. The moment
is rich in contradictory connotations. It
explicitly evokes the Western, and the
figure of the adventurer-hero to which
George aspires. Earlier, it was for Mary
that George wanted to "lasso the
moon," the adventurer's exploits moti¬
vated by a desire to make happy the
woman who will finally entrap him in
domesticity. From Mary's point of view.

48 jANUARY-FEBRUARY 1977

the picture is at once affectionate (ac¬
knowledging the hero's aspirations),
mocking (reducing them to caricature),
and possessive (reducing George to an
image she creates and holds within her
hands).

The most overtly presented of the
film's structural oppositions is that be¬
tween the two faces of Capitalism, be¬
nign and malignant: on the one hand,
the Baileys (father and son) and their
Building and Loan Company, its busi¬
ness practice based on a sense of human
needs and a belief in human goodness;
on the other. Potter (Lionel Barrymore),
described explicitly as a spider, moti¬
vated by greed, egotism and miserliness,
with no faith in human nature. Potter
belongs to a very deeply rooted tradi¬
tion. He derives most obviously from
Dickens' Scrooge (the film is set at
Christmas)—a Scrooge disturbingly
unrepentant and irredeemable—but his
more distant antecedents are in the ogres
of fairy tales.

The opposition gives us not only two
attitudes to money and property but two
father-images (Bailey Sr. and Potter),
each of whom gives his name to the land
(Bailey Park, in small-town Bedford
Falls, and Pottersville, the town's dark
alternative). Most interestingly, the two
figures (American choices, American
tendencies) find their vivid ideological
extensions in Hollywood genres: the
happy, sunny world of small town com¬
edy (Bedford Falls is seen mostly in the
daytime), the world o£film noir, the dark
underside of Hollywood ideology.

Pottersville—the vision of the town as
it would have been if George had never
existed, shown him by his guardian
angel (Henry Travers)—is just as "real"
(or no more stylized) than Bedford Falls.
The iconography of small-town comedy
is exchanged, unmistakably, for that of
film noir , with police sirens, shooting in
the streets, darkness, vicious dives, al¬
coholism, burlesque shows, strip clubs,
the glitter and shadows of noir lighting.
George's mother, embittered and
malevolent, runs a seedy boarding¬
house; the good-time gal/wife-mother
opposition, translated into noir terms,
becomes an opposition of prostitute and
repressed spinster-librarian. The towns
emerge as equally valid images of
America—validated by their generic
familiarity.

Beside SHADOW OF A DOUBT, IT'S A
WONDERFUL LIFE manages a convincing
and moving affirmation of the values
land value) of bourgeois family life. Yet
rwhat is revealed, when disaster releases
(George's suppressed tensions, is the in¬
tensity of his resentment of the family
and desire to destroy it—and with it, in
significant relationship, his work (his
culminating action is furiously to over¬
throw the drawing-board with his plans
for more small-town houses). The film

recognizes explicitly that behind every
Bedford Falls lurks a Pottersville, and
implicitly that within every George
Bailey lurks THE SEARCHERS' Ethan Ed¬
wards. Potter, tempting George, is given
the devil's insights into his suppressed
desires. His remark, "You once called
me a warped, frustrated old man—now
you're a warped, frustrated young man,"
is amply supported by the evidence the
film supplies. What is finally striking
about the film's affirmation is the ex¬
treme precariousness of its basis; and
Potter survives, without remorse, his
crime unexposed and unpunished. It
may well be Capra's masterpiece, but it is
more than that. Like all the greatest
American films—fed by a complex
generic tradition and, beyond that, by
the fears and aspirations of a whole
culture—it at once transcends its director
and would be inconceivable without
him.

S HADOW OF A DOUBT has always been
among the most popular of Hitch¬
cock's middle-period films, with critics
and public alike, but it has been per¬
ceived in very different, almost diametri¬
cally opposed ways. On its appearance it
was greeted by British critics as the film
marking Hitchcock's coming-to-terms
with America; his British films were
praised for their humor and "social criti¬
cism" as much as for their suspense, and
the early American films (notably RE¬
BECCA and suspicion) seemed like at¬
tempts artificially to reconstruct England
in Hollywood. In SHADOW, Hitchcock
(with the aid of Thornton Wilder and
Sally Benson) at last brought to Ameri¬
can middle-class society the shrewd
satirical, affectionate gaze previously
bestowed on British. A later generation
of French critics (notably Rohmer and
Chabrol in their Hitchcock book) praised
the film for very different reasons, estab¬
lishing its strict formalism (Truffaut's
"un film fonde sur le chiffre 2") and see¬
ing it as one of the keys to a consistent
Catholic interpretation of Hitchcock, a
rigorous working-out of themes of
Original Sin, the loss of innocence, the
Fallen World, the exchange (or inter¬
changeability) of guilt. The French noted
the family comedy beloved of British cri¬
tics, if at all, as a mildly annoying dis¬
traction.

That both these views correspond to
important elements in the film and
throw light on certain aspects of it is be¬
yond doubt; both, however, now appear
false and partial, dependent upon the
abstracting of elements from the whole.
If the film is, in a sense, completely
dominated by Hitchcock (nothing in it is
unmarked by his artistic personality), a
complete reading would need to see the
small-town-family elements and the
Catholic elements as threads weaving
through a complex fabric in which.

again, ideological and generic determin¬
ants are crucial.

The kind of "synthetic" analysis I have
suggested (going beyond an interest in
the individual auteur) reveals IT'S A
WONDERFUL LIFE as a far more potentially
subversive film than has been generally
recognized, but its subversive elements
are, in the end, successfully contained.
In SHADOW OF A DOUBT the Hollywood
ideology I have sketched is shattered be¬
yond convincing recuperation. One can,
however, trace through the film its at¬
tempts to impose itself and render things
"safe." What is in jeopardy is above alT"
the Family—but, given the Family's
central ideological significance, once that
is in jeopardy, everything is. The small
town (still rooted in the agrarian dream,
in ideals of the virgin land as a garden of
innocence) and the united happy family
are regarded as the real sound heart of
American civilization; the ideological
project is to acknowledge the existence
of sickness and evil but preserve the
family from their contamination.

A number of strategies can be dfsr^
cerned here: the attempt to insist on a
separation of Uncle Charlie from Santa (
Rosa; his death at the end of the film, as \
the definitive purging of evil; the pro¬
duction of the young detective (the
healthy, wholesome, small-town male)
as a marriage partner for young Charlie,
that the Family may be perpetuated;
above all, the attribution of Uncle Char¬
lie's sexual pathology to a childhood ac¬
cident, as a means of exonerating the
Family of the charge of producing a
monster (a possibility the American
popular cinema, with the contemporary
overturning of traditional values, can
now envisage—e. g., IT'S ALIVE!).

The famous opening, with its parallel
introductions of Uncle Charlie and
Young Charlie, insists on the city and the
small town as opposed , sickness and evil
being of the city. As with Bedford Falls/
Pottersville, the film draws lavishly on
the iconography of usually discrete
genres. Six shots (with all movement
and direction—the bridges, the panning,
the editing—consistently rightward)
leading up to the first interior of Uncle
Charlie's room give us urban technolo¬
gy, wreckage both human (the down-
and-outs) and material (the dumped cars
by the sign "No Dumping Allowed"),
children playing in the street, the
number 13 on the lodging-house door.
Six shots (movement and direction con¬
sistently left) leading to the first interior
of Young Charlie's room give us sunny
streets with no street-games (Santa Rosa
evidently has parks), an orderly town
with a smiling, paternal policeman pre¬
siding over traffic and pedestrians.

In Catholic terms, this is the Fallen
World against a world of apparent pre-
lapsarian innocence; but it is just as valid
to interpret the images, as in IT'S A WON-

FILM COMMENT 49

DERFUL LIFE, in terms of the two faces of
American capitalism. Uncle Charlie has
money (the fruits of his crimes and his
aberrant sexuality) littered in disorder
over table and floor; the Santa Rosa
policeman has behind him the Bank of
America. The detailed paralleling of
uncle and niece can of course be read as
comparison as much as contrast, and the
opposition that of two sides of the same
coin. The point is clearest in that crucial,
profoundly disturbing scene where film
noir erupts into Santa Rosa itself: the visit
to the "Til Two" bar, where Young
Charlie is confronted with her alter ego
Louise the waitress, her former class¬
mate. The scene equally invites Catholic

low-angle shot of Uncle Charlie's train
rushing toward Santa Rosa, underlining
the effect with an ominous crashing
chord on the soundtrack.

Uncle Charlie is one of the supreme
embodiments of the key Hitchcock fig -
ure: ambiguousl y devil and lost soul .
■When his tram reaches Santa Rosa, the
image is blackened by its smoke. From
his first appearance, Charlie is associated
consistently with a cigar (its phallic con¬
notations evident from the outset, in the
scene with the landlady) and repeatedly
shown with a wreath of smoke curling
around his head (no one else in the film
smokes except Joe, the displaced father,
who has a paternal pipe, usually unlit).

the mutual responsiveness and affec¬
tion, that Capra so beautifully creates in
the Bailey families, senior and junior, of
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, are here almost
entirely lacking—and this despite the
fact, in itself of great ideological interest,
that the treatment of the family in
SHADOW OF A DOUBT has generally been
perceived (even, one guesses, by Hitch¬
cock himself) as affectionate.

The most striking characteristic of the
Spencers is the separateness of each
member; the recurring point of the cele¬
brated overlapping dialogue is thatjio
one ever listens to what anyone els^TTs

savingrLach is locked in a separate tan :

^ FAMILY TRIANGLE: Uncle (Joseph Cotten), Niece (Teresa Wright), Sister (Patricia Collinge).

and Marxist commentaries; its force
arises from the revelation of the
Fallen-World/ capitalist-corruption-
and-deprivation at the heart of the
American small town. The close jux¬
taposition of genres has implications that
reach out through the whole generic
structure of the classical Hollywood
cinema.

The subversion of ideology within the
film is everywhere traceable to Hitch¬
cock's presence, to the skepticism and
nihilism that lurk just behind the jocular
facade of his public image. His Catholi¬
cism is in reality the lingering on in his
work of the darker aspects of Catholic
mythology: Hell without Heaven. The
traces are clear enough. Young Charlie
wants a "miracle"; she thinks of her
uncle as the "one who can save us" (and
her mother immediately asks, "What do
you mean, save us?"); when she finds his
telegram, in the very act of sending hers,
her reaction is an ecstatic "He heard me,
he heard me!" Hitchcock cuts at once to a

Several incidents (the escape from the
policemen at the beginning, the garage
door slammed as by remote control) in¬
vest him with a quasi-supernatural
power. Rather than restrict the film to a
Catholic reading, it seems logical to con¬
nect these marks with others: the thread
of superstition that runs through the film
(the number 13; the hat on the bed; "Sing
at table and you'll marry a crazy hus¬
band"; the irrational dread of the utter¬
ance, however innocent, of the forbid¬
den words "Merry Widow") and the
telepathy motif (the telegrams, the tune
"jumping from head to head")—the
whole Hitchcockian sense of life at the^
mercy ^qU ^rihlp , un predictable forcj i.
that have to be kept down .

The Hitchcockian dread of repressed
forces is characteristically accompanied
Vy n^e-oLth e _em:jxtii i£&SJuL^^
wor ld that represses them , and this cru-
aally affects the'presentafion in SHADOW
OF A DOUBT of the American small-town
l family. The warmth and togetherness.

tasy world: Emmy in the past, Joe in
crime, Anne in books read, apparently,
less for pleasure than as a means of
amassing knowledge with which she has
little emotional contact (though she also
believes that everything she reads is
"true"). The parents are trapped in a
petty materialism (both respond to
Young Charlie's dissatisfaction with the
assumption that she's talking about
money) and reliance on "honest toil" as
the means of using up energies. In
shadow OF A DOUBT the ideological
image of the small-town happy family
becomes the flimsiest facade. That so
many are nonetheless deceived by it tes¬
tifies only to the strength of the ideo-
logy—one of whose functions is of
course to inhibit the imagining of radical
alternatives.

I have argued elsewhere that the key
to Hitchcock's films is less suspense than
sexuality (or, alternatively, that his
"suspense" always carries a sexual
charge in ways sometimes obvious,
sometimes esoteric); and that sexual re¬
lationships in his work are inevitably
based on power, the obsession-with-
power/dread-of-impotence being as
central to his method as to his thematic.
In SHADOW OF A DOUBT it is above all sex¬
uality that cracks apart the family facade.
As far as the Hays code permitted, a
double incest theme runs through the
film: Uncle Charlie and Emmy, Uncle
Charlie and Young Charlie. Necessarily,
this is expressed through images and
motifs, never becoming verbally explicit;
certain of the images depend on a sup¬
pressed verbal play for their significance.

For the reunion of brother and sister,
Hitchcock gives us an image (Emmy
poised left of screen, arrested in mid¬
movement, Charlie right, under trees
and sunshine) that iconographically
evokes the reunion of lovers (Charlie
. wants to see Emmy again as she was
when she was "the prettiest girl on the
block"). And Emmy's breakdown, in
front of her embarrassed friends and
neighbors, at the news of Charlie's im¬
minent departure, is eloquent. As for
uncle and niece, they are introduced
symmetrically lying on beds, Uncle
Charlie fondling his phallic cigar. Young

50 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Charlie prone, hands behind head.
When Uncle Charlie gets off the train he
is bent over a stick, pretending to be ill;
as soon as he sees Young Charlie he
"comes erect," flourishing the stick. One
of his first actions on taking over her
bedroom is to pluck a rose for his but¬
tonhole ("deflowering"). More obvi¬
ously, there is the business with the ring,
which not only, as a symbolic token of
engagement, links Charlie sexually with
her uncle, but also links her, through its
previous ownership, to his succession of
merry widows. The film shows sexual
pathology at the heart of the American
family, the necessary product of its re¬
pressions and sublimations.

As for the "accident"—that old critical
stumbling-block—it presents no prob¬
lem at all, provided one is ready to ac¬
knowledge the validity of a psycho¬
analytical reading of movies. Indeed, it
provides a rather beautiful example of
the way in which ideology, in seeking to
impose itself, succeeds merely in con¬
firming its own subversion. The "ac¬
cident" (Charlie was "riding a bicycle"
for the first time, which resulted in a
"collision") can be read as elementary
Freudian metaphor for the trauma of
premature sexual awakening (after
which Charlie was "never the same
again"). The smothering sexual/ pos¬
sessive devotion of a doting older sister
maybe felt to provide a clue to the sexual
motivation behind the merry-widow
murders; Charlie isn't interested in
money. Indeed, Emmy connected to the
merry widows by an associative chain in
which important links are her own prac¬
tical widowhood (her ineffectual hus¬
band is largely ignored), her ladies' club,
and its leading light Mrs. Potter, Uncle
Charlie's potential next-in-line.

A fuller analysis would need to dwell
on the limitations of Hitchcock's vi¬
sion, nearer the nihilistic than the tragic;
on his inability to conceive of repressed
energies as other than evil, and the sur¬
face world that represses them as other
than shallow and unfulfilling. This ex¬
plains why there can be no Heaven cor¬
responding to Hitchcock's Hell, for
every vision of Heaven that is not merely
negative is rooted in a concept of the lib¬
eration of the instincts, the Resurrection
of the Body, which Hitchcock must al¬
ways deny. But my final stress is less on
the evaluation of a particular film or di¬
rector than on the implications for a criti¬
cism of the Hollywood cinema of the no¬
tions of interaction and multiple deter-
minacy I have been employing. It is its
rootedness in the Hollywood genres,
and in the very ideological structure it so
disturbingly subverts, that makes
SHADOW OF A DOUBT so much more
suggestive and significant a work than
Hitchcock the bourgeois entertainer
could ever have guessed.®

®

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FILM COMMENT 51

ALL PHOTOS: LES FILMS DU LOSANGE

pumrmaY wmmrnss

Barbet Schroeder interviewed by Elliott Stein

Barbet Schroeder (center) directs the "customers" in maitresse.

The following interview was taped at the
Algonquin Hotel a few days after the Ameri¬
can theatrical premiere of MAITRESSE.LA
VALLtE is to be released here early in 1977.

L et's begin with your career as a pro¬
ducer of films by Eric Rohmer, Jacques
Rivette, and others. How did Les Films
du Losange get started?

The company was born at the Cahiers
du cinema. The Cahiers, during the late
Fifties and early Sixties, was an extraor¬
dinary meeting place, the closest thing I
ever saw to a literary salon, only it was a
cinema salon. Every afternoon people
came by at five o'clock and talked about
the film they had just seen or other
movies. It was extraordinary. Rohmer
was co-director of the Cahiers. He had
directed LE SIGNE DU LION, a picture I ad¬
mired a great deal.

That was his first feature?

Right. His first feature, produced by

Chabrol. A total commercial flop. I think
3000 people in Paris saw it at the time. He
asked me if I wanted to work with him on
a series of films he was starting. The first
one was LA BOULANGtRE de MONCEAU in
1962, the first of the six Moral Tales , a
short. He also asked me to act in it. I
ended up not only acting but organizing
everything. There were three people in
the crew—Rohmer, an amateur
cameraman, and. myself; it was shot
without sound in 16mm black and white.
The cost of the film was—since Rohmer
always, from the beginning, used very
little film—only about $300. For that
price, the film was in the lab without the
money to have it developed, but it
existed.

Had you had much experience in films be¬
fore that?

Yes, I had worked as an assistant to
Godard, and I was a real movie freak.
Ever since I was fourteen, I had been

seeing two American movies a day and I
decided I wanted to be a director. Then
there was Cahiers and I worked with
Godard on LES CARABINEERS. After this
first Moral Tale with Rohmer, Rohmer
had to leave the Cahiers du cinema be¬
cause of internal fighting. He was with¬
out a job and started to work in educa¬
tional television to make a living. He did
a few very interesting programs there. I
started the production company—I was
twenty-two or something like that. The
first Moral Tale was in the lab but we
were broke; so instead of finishing it, we
went on and started the second one,
shooting with the same system. Some¬
one from the film school who was just
learning to handle a camera did the
photography. We spent maybe $500 and
the second Moral Tale, la carri£re de
SUZANNE (fifty-two minutes) was wait¬
ing to be developed. It is one of my favo¬
rite Moral Tales.

52 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

What year zvas this?

1963. We had to find money to finish
the films. The two pictures ended up
costing about $10,000.

Let's get into PARIS VU PAR. . .

When we started this production
company, we were working with
Rohmer in 16mm which we thought was
the solution for films d'auteur . The Debrie
machine had been invented which was
supposed to permit projecting 16mm in
theaters, adapting to the regular 35mm
machinery and using some of its mecha¬
nisms. My idea was to launch a new way
of producing 16mm cinema d'auteur. The
production company would have an
aesthetic line, like some publishing
houses, and in order to launch it we
made a sketch film in 1964, PARIS VU PAR
. . . Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Douchet,
Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jean-
Daniel Pollet, and Jean Rouch.

When we started it, the new ficlair
16mm camera had not yet been per¬
fected. The first sketch we shot, by
Jean-Daniel Pollet, was done with the
16mm camera still hidden in the big
blimp, and very heavy. But for the
Godard, the second sketch, the Maysles
Brothers came with their hand-held
sound camera. It was the beginning of
16mm and live sound. But the Debrie
machine, supposed to adapt 16mm to
35mm projectors in theaters, didn't
work, so we wound up by blowing up
PARIS VU PAR ... to 35mm, as was later
done for the first two of Rohmer's Moral
Tales. But although all these ideas about
16mm distribution were dropped, in this
film there was a great deal of interesting
experimentation. In the Rouch se¬
quence—called GARE DU NORD, my sec¬
ond film as an actor—we wanted to do a
seventeen-minute film in one single

Mimsy Farmer and Klaus Grunberg in more.

shot. There was, for technical reasons, a
cut along the way; but in fact the film has
the actual continuity as if it were a single
seventeen-minute shot. The Godard se¬
quence in the film, called MONT-
PARNASSE-LEVALLOIS was also very im¬
portant for him, and led right into the
group of films he made just after it, be¬
ginning with BANDE A PART.

Was PARIS VU PAR . . . the only time you
produced a Chabrol film?

Yes, Chabrol was enthusiastic about
our ideas for 16mm and was pleased to
do that very personal sketch as a change
from the commercial movies he was
making at the time—those "Tiger" films.

But the stable , if it can be called that , of
Losange directors is composed of Rohmer,
yourself , Rivette, Eustache . . .

Well, in fact, the Films du Losange was
mostly an instrument to produce my
movies and those of Rohmer but we did
end up producing the films of other
French directors in the same "family." It
was never intended to go for production
in a big way and make very many
movies. We always wanted to stay on an
artisan level.

After that was LA COLLECTIONEUSE?

La COLLECTIONEUSE, in 1966, was in
fact the fourth Moral Tale. We had
wanted to do the third one, MY NIGHT AT
MAUD'S, but every one refused it saying it
would be a filmed play, that it was a
boring script. It was refused by televi¬
sion, so we gave up on it for the time
being and did LA COLLECTIONEUSE in¬
stead of MAUD which would have cost
more. For LA COLLECTIONEUSE it was the
same system, to get the film in the lab,
everything to be paid later, but to have
the film exist. We rented an old house
near St. Tropez. Everyone lived in the
house and we shot there. It was Nestor
Almendros's first feature. We both have
a vivid memory of the shooting. We were
both very influenced later by the style of
this film.

M ORE was your first film as a di¬
rector?

Yes. At the time I produced LA COLLEC¬
TIONEUSE, I also assisted Rohmer, doing
the electricity, doing everything possi¬
ble. Working on the movies I was pro¬
ducing was an apprenticeship, like
someone who's learning, not someone
who's producing. That part was impor¬
tant to me, the shooting of all those
Moral Tales , PARIS VU PAR . . ., and LA COL¬
LECTIONEUSE because for all those years I
was thinking about MORE. It started as a
mixture of stories that happened to
someone else and stories that happened
to me. I always make a mixture of the two
things.

Was Mimsy Farmer well known in Europe
when you picked her for more?

No, I saw her in a film made by Roger
Corman. In every picture of hers I saw,
even the worst ones, she had at least five

extraordinary shots. Then, the thing that
really excited me was that she had quit
acting to become a nurse in a hospital, in
a very special hospital where they were
treating alcoholics with acid. She herself
had not taken heroin and was not part of
the drug culture. The script was a little
bit like THE BLUE ANGEL, a story of love
and destruction. I wanted to create the
character of a new kind of vamp, some¬
one you would never think was a vamp,
someone innocently perverse, like a
strange nurse.

One of the things I remember with most
pleasure about MORE zvas the music.

At that time Pink Floyd had only done
two albums. I loved their music, so I
went to see them. I went to them for la
VALL fiE also. We discussed every number
but they were free to do a record along
those lines and I was free to pick up what
I wanted, not to use those numbers in
scenes as film music to reinforce effects,
but always as part of the live soundtrack,
as music coming from a cassette or a re¬
cord player. The music was done after
the picture was finished.

But they did see it first?

They saw the film and we discussed
scenes. I made sure not to have the music
imposed from outside on the film, but
coming from inside the rooms. I re¬
corded the music from a loudspeaker in
an auditorium so as to have the spacial
dimension of the room in the music and
not to have it sound as if glued onto the
film.

T he only film directed by you zohich I've
not seen is called SING SING . Was it made
in New Guinea at the same time as LA vall£e?

If you've seen LA VALLfiE, you've seen
SING SING. On every film I do a lot of re¬
search. In order to get acquainted with
New Guinea I went there with Nestor
Almendros and did a straight ethnologi¬
cal documentary on the dance ritual
called the Sing Sing, which is a pidgin
English word for this kind of celebration.
There are several shorts, one on the
dancing, one on the pig-killing that goes
with it, and one on the painting of the
faces. It was research.

Has it been shown?

No, I have problems with the com¬
mentary. To put commentary on a doc¬
umentary like this would embarrass me.
I hate commentary on ethnological films
that tells you what things are, because
we're coming from the outside. One
thing I like in some new ethnological
documentaries is the use of subtitles. I
tried that a bit in LA VALL£e, to translate
some of the things said by the natives.

The natives are so jolly! Not menacing, not
even wary. Conditioned by so many cliched
jungle films, it's not what you expect. Is that
the way they were?

For example, in the scene of the first
contact. We were already there with
Nestor. They knew us but not the other

FILM COMMENT 53

actors. Suddenly they saw all these
horses arriving. They didn't know if it
was part of the film or not, and we filmed
their welcoming reactions. In that part
my idea worked—to do a fiction film in a
documentary setting.

Were you ever thinking of LOST HORIZON?
Yes, but they never get there; the
movie stops before they even see it.

So one doesn't know if this New Guinea
Shangri-la exists.

No. There is a big chance that it
doesn't. They may die on the spot, the
victims of the fantasy which has driven
them so far.

The spiritual transformation is fascinat¬
ing: Originally , Bulle Ogier is cynical while
everyone else is striving to find the valley.
Little by little she is the one whose major ob¬
session the valley becomes.

At the end she becomes the leader.
And that was the idea—the discovery of
sensuality and pleasure, the discovery of
Dionysus by a woman who was at the
other extreme: bourgeois, strict, uptight.

It is a story of transformation. My work¬
ing idea at the beginning was to make a
Dionysian EUROPA 51, because EUROPA 51
followed the Christian idea, the trans¬
formation of a bourgeois woman who
through the death of her son discovers
true Christianity and is then considered
crazy.

Was Rossellini an important director for
you?

Very.

Still? Late Rossellini?

Yes, but I'm too young to be as wise as
he is. And I still like the sensuality of
making a shot and putting the sound on
it, and working on that. He works only
on the ideas now.

How much of the plot of la vallee was
written before you got to New Guinea?

I had met a guy—the character of
Gaetan was based on him—who was
taking a group of people to Singapore.
They followed him because he was a
mystic leader, something like the early
Manson,. not the late Manson, but the
early one who was Jesus Christ. He was
not into Christianity at all, but he was
that kind of character, very Dionysian,
very mad. He had drawn on a map an
island between Borneo and the Philip¬
pines. It was not on any other map.

It'S like KING KONG.

Exactly. But the expedition was real,
the island probably was not. He had
money to buy a Chinese junk and take all
those people on this trip. When I talked
to him, I found out that at times he didn't
believe in the island. He wanted to de¬
stroy time, and the trip was more im¬
portant than the island.

I wrote a script about twenty people on
a junk looking for the island. It was
planned for Steve Ben Israel and other
members of the Living Theatre to be in it,
but it would have been expensive, close
to a million dollars. I couldn't raise the

Bulle Ogier with the natives in la vall£e.

money. Later, I changed the island to a
valley, when I found out that the last
white spots on the map were in New
Guinea. During the shooting, I spoke to
a geologist who had just discovered an
uncharted valley on my birthday a few
days earlier. And it was near Mount
Schraeder—there's a Schraeder moun¬
tain range in New Guinea. So I changed
the story and instead of twenty people
on a junk looking for an island, it became
six people in a land rover looking for a
valley—a modern community fleeing
from civilization, trying to make contact
with a primitive community. Nothing
could happen. It was all fantasy, like the
valley itself. We rewrote many scenes on
the spot, but it had all been structured
before. The film was shot in absolute
continuity from beginning to end, to
maintain the idea of a trip. But one thing
that got a bit lost through this way of
filming was the character of Olivier. His
Apollonian rationality which comes out
in the dialogue toward the end was not
prepared for properly in the script and
comes as too much of a surprise. That's
the only thing I regret about the film.

Off in the interior of New Guinea, were
you seeing any rushes?

No. Only when we got back to Paris.

You shot the whole picture and then saw
the rushes? Nothing could be reshot then.

Same for MORE. There was always a big
risk involved. For MORE, I couldn't see
them because I had given a script to the
Spanish authorities which did not men¬
tion drugs or the Nazi character—
instead there was an innocent love story.
So I couldn't look at rushes because they
might have seen them. It was too risky.
For THE VALLEY, we sent the film off in a
little airplane like the one you see in the
movie, in a suitcase we painted white so
that if it was in the sun, it wouldn't catch
too much heat. We sent about one suit¬
case a week and prayed, because it was
on a little airplane, going to another little
plane, to a bigger one going to Australia,
and then two weeks later, it reached

Paris. It was crazy. Sometimes a suitcase
went all around the world, or got lost for
a month. And we were exchanging fran¬
tic cables with the people in Paris.

Nestor must have had his problems.

He had already gotten used to shoot¬
ing like this on MORE. We got special de¬
livery letters with clips of the rushes, but
they came so late that if there had been
anything wrong, it would have been ter¬
rible to reshoot. It was exciting because
there was this feeling of adventure I
wanted—you can feel it in the film. It's
important to me—even if you film in a
closed room, somewhere there must be
the idea of adventure.

T hat comes through. Of all your films, so
far IDI AMIN DAD A is the one best known.

I got coverage on this film of a sort I'll
never have again on another picture.
Magazines from all over the world were
calling. It was strange to find oneself
suddenly in a situation like that because
for me it was a movie. The way I filmed
Amin Dada, it was the same way I went
about filming the character of Gaetan in
THE VALLEY. I used a lot of Jean-Pierre
Kalfon himself in the picture. If Steve
Ben Israel had played the character, as
originally planned, it would then have
been something of a documentary on
Steve Ben Israel. I filmed Kalfon the
same way I filmed Amin Dada—without
judging. Sometimes I was irritated by
the dialogue he added, or the way he
looked at things. Sometimes I was pissed
off because Nestor Almendros was much
closer to the natives than my main
character who was supposed to be so
close to them. I was really pissed off at
that because my character was not sup¬
posed to be like that. But at the same time
I felt, well, if he's like that. I'll let him be
like that. So in a way, it is also a docu¬
mentary on him, and I tried not to judge
him. Even with things I didn't like, I
wouldn't interfere, I let them happen. So
the ideas that he expresses are the ones
of that character, not always mine.

54 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Idi Amin Dada with BarbetSchroede

How did IDI AMIN DADA get off the
ground?

I read a lot about him and was fasci¬
nated by this character who was actually
at the head of a country, doing every¬
thing according to his own fantasies.
And his fantasies were on a planetary
scale. I cut articles from the papers (a
thing I never do) about him. I wanted to
know the man. I proposed the idea of a
film on him to Jean-Pierre Rassam who
had TV connections, people who were
doing a series about heads of state. The
man who was doing this series, Jean-
Frangois Chauvel, knew someone in
Kampala; they got in contact with Idi
Amin and asked him if he would like to
have a TV film done on him. He said yes,
but nothing was signed. No exchange
of letters or contracts. The television
wouldn't send us without a definite prior
arrangement. So Rassam was the one
who actually took the financial risk of
sending us there to see what would hap¬
pen. The day after we arrived we met
Amin Dada. I took a chance and came
with the camera and kept it running
during our first meeting—ready of
course, to stop if it disturbed Amin.

Did Amin ever ask to see the rushes?

No. But I felt I had no right to decide
what to show and what not to show
about him. I didn't know enough about
his country or Africa. Sol asked him to
help me do the film: I wanted it to be a
self-portrait. I asked him to tell me what I
should show about him. Of course, he
started by wanting to show industry and
dams, like all heads of state. So I told
him: "I'll film anything you want, but it's
a movie about you, so you must be in the
frame." So it went well although nothing
had been signed, and the rushes went
back to Paris. After two weeks, I went
back to Paris and edited it exactly the
way I wanted. That took a long time, be¬
cause I didn't want it to be a movie that
could be used by anybody—for Amin,
against him, or whatever. I didn't want
the editing to impose any special mean¬
ings. There are some shots that are only
there as transition between sequences.

For instance, there is a shot of bats flying.

I just needed a pause there for rhythm,
so I put the bats in. But it was not to de¬
pict Uganda as a place of horror. When
I'd finished the editing, I didn't send off
a print right away. I opened the movie.
Later, when he got a print, naturally he
didn't like the part in which he is men¬
tioned as responsible for the deaths of
thousands of people. So he wanted to
break relations with France. He did the
movie because it was the French televi¬
sion and France was a friend of the
Arabs. So he thought that by menacing
to break relations he could get me to
make cuts. I refused. Then he said to the
French ambassador, "You'd better
round up all your citizens for evacuation;
I'm kicking them out of the country."
They were rounded up from all over
Uganda, and they started calling me.
Even if they were not really hostages, I
considered them as such and I was mor¬
ally obliged to make the cuts. I think one
could say it was the first movie censor¬
ship in history by means of hostages.

If we learned tonight that Idi Amin had
been assassinated or overthrown, would you
reinstate the cuts?

Right away, but the total length of the
cuts is a minute and a half.

What about that scene with one of his
ministers?

That was the second cut. At one point I
had to intrude and mention that the
minister he was screaming at during the
cabinet meeting, two weeks after that
scene was shot, was found dead in the
Nile. It was an official piece of news. I
didn't say it was Amin who had killed
him, but it was pretty obvious. When the
film was over, I didn't want audiences to
be able to think only that Amin was a
funny man—without feeling the terror.
People have divergent views on Amin,
and I didn't want one single group to be
able to claim the movie's viewpoint as its
own. My cinematic approach was such
that the result is a character that is almost
out of a fiction movie. And what I like is
that the fiction in the film (and there is
some fiction) is the fiction created by the

character who is the subject of the docu¬
mentary. For me it is always the interac¬
tion of fiction and documentary which is
interesting in cinema.

N ow, let's get into maitresse which has
just opened here and been roasted by the
critics from the three major New York dailies.
Do you feel it has been less well understood
here than in France?

A little less. In France, it was fifty per¬
cent roasting and fifty percent raving.

At Berkeley, the students were a terribly
good audience. They liked the film.

In Telluride too. I didn't expect that in
New York many critics would only talk
about the scenes that happen on the floor
below—the SM scenes. They're only fif¬
teen percent of the movie.

It seemed to me that in some of the reviews I
read in New York, it was evident that the
picture made critics uncomfortable and they
resorted to cheap humor defensively.

Well, I can't psychoanalyze critics who
don't like my film. That would be unfair,
and they have a right not to like it. But
the reaction really centered on that fif¬
teen percent. And that was strange be¬
cause, although those scenes are essen¬
tial, the main subject is the love story
between two people, and how in this
love story, all the masochism that is hap¬
pening on the floor beneath is also hid¬
den in scenes of daily life.

The film is dedicated, I think, to the woman
who inspired the character played by Bulle.

Yes, she's an extraordinary, intelli¬
gent, and sensitive woman. I met her
while researching MAITRESSE. She actu¬
ally gave all the soul and flesh to the
character played by Bulle.

What does she think of maitresse?

She likes it very much. I went over
every scene, every little thing with her in
order to be sure nothing was wrong.
And since part of the story was based on
something that happened in her private
life, it was important to me to have her
reaction to what was happening upstairs
even more than in the apartment below.

The happy ending comes as a bit of a sur¬
prise and is one of the loveliest things about
the film. When homosexual films started
coming out of the closet, so many of them
seemed to end in suicide, or tragically-and in
general were downers. SM, of whatever sort,
has been even deeper in the closet.

It has often been associated with
Nazis, especially in the movies.

Most people expect an unhappy ending.
But after the car crash they walk off into the
sunset. Most people are expecting a moraliz¬
ing ending because they tend to think about a
situation like this in cliches, like Depardieu
who assumes that there must be an evil pimp
behind Bulle.

It was important to me all the way
through to avoid any moral approach to
the subject. It seemed a question of hav¬
ing the right distance, always, even in
terms of camera: the proper distance for

FILM COMMENT 55

Bulle Ogier and Gerard Depardieu in maitresse.

someone just contemplating these
scenes. If you're too far—and this is true
especially of the scenes downstairs—if
you're too far, you're avoiding the sub¬
ject. If you're too close, you're trying to
manipulate the audience; it has no
choices to make. The right distance—it's
strange for me—I call the distance of
love.

Roberto Plate's decor is terrific.

Plate is a painter who arrived in Paris
with an Argentinian theater group. For
me the decor was an essential part of the
film. I had to find a house that was going
to be torn down in order to arrange it the
way I wanted. That way I had all the ad¬
vantages of a studio—I could knock a
wall down, make a hole between the two
apartments, whatever I needed. And the
advantages of it being a real location was
that when the window was opened, you
could feel that there was life outside, not
a painted backdrop for the other side of
the street.

Was the ladder constructed for the film?
Bulle's descent , preceded by the thump of the
ladder-ominous and erotic-is fantastically
effective.

The ladder was essential. I started
with an idea of a hidden connecting lad¬
der. I was always impressed in Hol¬
lywood movies by the way staircases are
often an important element. In Hitch¬
cock there are so many staircases. In
Welles, too. The most impressive one for
me was in Nicholas Ray's bigger than
life. I used to fantasize about those stair¬
cases. Here, of course, it had to have a
secret element. I was obsessed by the
idea of a retractable ladder. There was a
model on sale of such a ladder. I called
the people who made them and found
out they had a special luxury model that

few people bought: an electric ladder.
That was fantastic, it was better than the
one I had been dreaming of.

Plate was also responsible for this idea
of cold marble downstairs—marble and
reflecting images. This cold approach to
the decor that we found was essential.
Any other French professional set de¬
signer would have made a lot of sur¬
realistic bric-a-brac, curtains, and other
ridiculous things. At that point the film
could have become ridiculous.

What is Depardieu like to work with?

Extraordinary. He's like Marlon
Brando and Michel Simon in one person.
He has the immense devastating hu¬
manity of Simon. When working, he is
completely relaxed and completely tense
at the same time. I couldn't get him to re¬
hearse the day before shooting as I did
with the rest of the cast. I had to follow
his way, which was a challenge. He
starts from zero every morning. You can
discuss a scene with him but not re¬
hearse in advance.

Does that mean he's better on the first take
or that each take is different?

Every take is different and as good as
the one before. I sometimes shot extra
takes just for the pleasure of it. I was fas¬
cinated to see how many variations he
could bring, especially with Bulle. The
whole shooting was done in a total state
of joy for everybody. I think that's im¬
portant to realize when you see the
movie, because it can have a depressing
effect on some people. Depardieu is an
incredibly intuitive actor who knows
where the camera is, down to a cen¬
timeter. With Bulle it's the other way
around. She creates something unique
for herself and doesn't always think of
the camera. But he knows exactly. I think

that from the first film he made he knew,
because it's not a question of experience.
He knew at once where the frame line
would cut him off in a shot.

There are few actors, hozvever experienced,
to whom you could say: "Now, she'll take you
into the other room and give you some money,
and ask you to pee in the face of someone
you've never seen/' and they would do it, as
he did, on the first take.

He helped me a lot by not being scared
of the subject. We had great
cohesion—we were not going to avoid
the disturbing things in this subject. He
never slowed me down.

I'm curious about the atmosphere on the set
when the customers were being filmed. Did
those who were masked say: "1 must be
masked so I won't be recognized?"

No, that had been agreed on in ad¬
vance with the professional mistress
who came with them. It went without
saying that since those people were rich
and important, some of them with wives
and children and living perfectly normal
sex lives at home, there was no way that
they would want to be recognized.
Something interesting happened during
the shooting of the scene when Bulle is
riding on the back of one of them. Such
things work only if there is a kind of
ritual. The man had to believe he was a
horse. Otherwise he would just have
been a rich man going on his knees for a
film crew and it would have been ridic¬
ulous. So he was a horse. He knew
exactly what we were trying to do; his
itinerary was to pace around. It was a
real mise-en-scene. But instead of follow¬
ing this itinerary, the "horse" obeyed
Bulle's wrong order and went in the di¬
rection she was indicating to him with
the reins. He behaved like a horse rather
than like a man playing a role.

Was the professional mistress on the set
during the shooting?

Oh, yes. She doubled for Bulle in some
parts and she was always there, of
course, and even helped in the mise-
en-scene.

Were there any situations when the
masochists became bossy and gave orders
about how they wanted to be mistreated?

Well, the man you see with the rack.
He came with his rack. He had made the
special table himself, but it takes up a lot
of space and he had never been able to
use it himself because there was never
enough room in the houses of the girls he
went to. He was delighted to be able to
use it in the film. He was so happy—but
he wanted many more things to be done
to him: gallons and gallons of water
poured into his mouth, etc. I told him
that I couldn't do everything.

Was there any attempt to make Bulle re¬
semble the real dominatrix?

No. Plate and I based the leather cos¬
tume on a photo of a prostitute taken in
Berlin in 1920.

56 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

Were there any SM scenes shot which were
cut?

No, because we shot very little. We did
just one or two days shooting with the
real "customers." I was satisfied with
this footage and didn't require any
more—I knew it was not a dirty docu¬
mentary. There was another dimension
to it that was important. How to show
something, a whole world, a paradise in¬
side someone without making it seem
merely externally dirty? If you just have a
crude documentary about masochism it
is only clinical and there is no spiritual
dimension. But how, through the image,
do you make the spectator feel the ritual
and the beauty that's in the head of the
character at that time? Same thing with
drugs: if you just show a needle going
into an arm, there is no meaning to it, no
idea of the paradise invading that person
at that moment. It was the same problem
with more: how to communicate some¬
thing essentially non-cinematographic.
In more it came across because it was
shot in a real paradise and the sensuality
of the surroundings helped to visualize
this idea.

Do you work with a storyboard , with
scenes sketched out in advance?

No. I work so much with the actors
that I often change my direction to ac¬
commodate the acting. I never force an
actor to do something first designed on
paper. I have experienced myself the

vulnerability of the actor.

Would you ever act in any of your own
films?

No. I couldn't. For me, again, it's this
thing of distance. If I was acting in it I
wouldn't be able to figure out the proper
distance.

Do you see Barbet Schroeder films often
after they're finished?

A few times at the first screenings.
Then again when it comes out, with the
audience to check pure reaction in the
theater. But after that I like to let some
time pass, to take my distance again.
Later, the film seems to change com¬
pletely from one viewing to another. In
most of my films, I find a lot of mistakes
and I'm furious when I see them later,
but I still take pleasure in seeing them.

Among those films that seem so different ,
what is the common link?

Well, there is the same approach to re¬
ality. But the link may be extremes—the
fact that in all my films there are people
who go to the extremes of themselves, to
the very end of their trajectories, with a
strong fantasy driving them and with a
sense of adventure. Amin Dada is really
a character going to the extreme of him¬
self. He blossomed with power. He
pushed himself far, and the power itself
pushed him further. In MAITRESSE, it is
not only the extremes to which the cus¬
tomers go. 1 had the idea that the final
scene in the car was an extreme of the

couple's relationship. It is the moment
when the masochism will be recognized
and equal for both persons of the love
affair, because at the wheel of the car
they are equal; there is an equal dose of
masochism in each of them. It's because
of their pleasure that each may take the
other one into death.

In a sense , the masochism is seen as a crea¬
tive force.

Right.

Perhaps that's a reason the film has been
misunderstood.

Yes. Surveys showed that women
were much less shocked or disturbed by
MAITRESSE than men were. Women don't
identify with the men in the film and
they like the fact that this woman is com¬
pletely free and holds her own life in her
hands. But I've really seen panic in some
men because somewhere inside they see
that it could be themselves on the screen.

Underneath their armor of aggressive
machos , somewhat sadistic to women , they
are actually repressing a drive for the oppo¬
site?

Right. The recognition of this—if they
don't let themselves confront it
squarely—can sometimes create a panic
state. It may just be a healthy experience
for them to come out of the movie after
having viewed such scenes. For me it
was definitely healthy. I had a lot of
trouble editing some scenes—it was dif¬
ficult, but I overcame the trouble. VC

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FILM COMMENT 57

THE RISE AND FALL
OF BRITISH DOCUMENTARY

BY ELIZABETH SUSSEX
University of California Press, 1975.
$11.95, 219 pages, illustrated, index.

REVIEWED BY
THOROLD DICKINSON

T he style of this book is remarkable.
The author tape-recorded inter¬
views with twelve members of the
British documentary movement and
then spent three years cutting and
mounting their remarks, occasionally
linking them with her own observations,
achieving what must be for the layman a
200-page dialogue among real people.
And, for the layman, therefore authen¬
tic.

Doubtless the statements are authen¬
tic, but the author does not indicate

where they are true, where they are mis¬
leading, or where, if not forthcoming,
the facts could be found. She does not
claim to have checked information or
opinion with sources outside her chosen
group; indeed she does not explain her
choice of its members. For her, research
is justifiably dictatorial, and the reader
can take it or leave it.

The layman will take it. In fact, he will
find it hard to put the book down. The
work that has gone into it is highly
skilled, disguised by an appearance of
the effortless. The characters that
emerge are rounded and by no means
lack disagreement, even conflict, though
they never let the side down. More de¬
tachment would have made the book
more accurate. Awkward points are
glossed over, leaving the story incom¬
plete. For instance, the emphasis is on
production, leading up to the complete
films, which are still available for view¬
ing. There is too little consideration of
the audience, without whom a film has
no reason for existence.

The documentary movement rose in
Britain at the time when the Film Society
of London succeeded in creating the new
Art-House Audience. The Film Society's
performances were the only ones at¬
tended by the film critics, the most selec¬
tive of whom reviewed them in the man¬
ner of a first night in the theater. When
John Grierson's DRIFTERS (the only film

he actually directed) was shown in Nov¬
ember 1929, the press reaction was con¬
siderable, even though the feature film
was POTEMKIN. The Government spon¬
sors were impressed. But the popular
theaters were at first indifferent, and it
was these that the sponsors wanted to at¬
tract. The run-of-the-mill exhibitors per¬
sisted in regarding the documentaries as
"egghead stuff." Grierson was stretched
between the sponsors' desire for reason¬
ably wide distribution and his col¬
leagues' desire for innovation. It was the
inevitable tug between the conservatism
of commerce and the creativity which
was the element that turned the factual
film into a documentary—the factual
film plus imagination.

Grierson tried to surmount the diffi¬
culty by publicizing the idea of the
"non-theatrical audience" outside the
commercial cinema, but it was impera¬
tive to have a contract with a commercial
distributor to meet the requirements of
his sponsors. The crisis came in 1935
with BBC—THE VOICE OF BRITAIN, which
his distributor refused to put out ("all
knobs and washing," he called it); in¬
deed, he withdrew his contract to dis¬
tribute GPO films. All that Mrs. Sussex
has to say about this calamity (p. 59) is
that "people are reticent about the trials
and tribulations of the production. . .but
there seems little doubt that there were
moments of crisis in the making." The

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fact is that Grierson thought the film
might sell better at feature length
(eighty-five to ninety minutes), since the
commercial cinemas had adopted the
double-feature program and had no time
for shorter films as well. I helped him to
reduce the film to fifty-six minutes, and
the result made it sufficiently entertain¬
ing for the distribution branch of the
studio for which I was chief editor to give
it a contract and also to give Grierson a
long-term contract embracing a series of
future films including NIGHT MAIL,
thereby putting him back in commercial
business.

There are other examples of in¬
adequate research in the book. Paul
Rotha is allowed to say (p. 101) that Sid¬
ney Cole and I went to Republican Spain
and made "three—well, not very good
films .... under very difficult condi¬
tions, to show at the Film Society; they
had no other showing at all." The facts
are that we made two newsreel reports
for fund-raising—not documentaries,
there was nothing creative about them,
no time and no money—and they were
shown nontheatrically all over Britain
and in Northern Europe as well, raising
considerable sums for Republican
causes. I myself was present at their
crowded first screening in London (at
the Queen's Hall, if I remember rightly),
where the collection in pounds sterling
ran into three figures.

Rotha is also allowed to say (p. 141),
talking about the documentary influence
on the fiction film in wartime, "Another
example was Carol Reed's the way
ahead, which was, I think I say in one of
my books, entirely based on a film called
THE COMMON LOT, a two-reeler which
Carol saw and which gave him the idea
of making THE WAY AHEAD." The facts are
that while I was producing training films
in the Army, Reed directed a military
training film in four reels called THE NEW
LOT, for the Department of Army Psychi¬
atry, to explain to recruits the meaning of
their four weeks of basic training. The
psychiatrists were so impressed that
Reed and his unit were transferred to
Two Cities Films to make a feature film
for public release, developing the same
subject for civilian propaganda. The re¬
sult was as successful as the original.

Ironies abound in the story. Grierson
was 3,000 miles away in Canada when
his movement reached the climax of its
achievement in Britain during World
War II. The book does not specify why
the Canadian prime minister was so anx¬
ious to employ him. The fact was that the
Canadian Government needed to build a
barrier against the United States influ¬
ences that were flooding across the 49th
Parallel. The National Film Board of
Canada was a big percentage of the an¬
swer. Grierson had to start the Film
Board from scratch, and made it an out¬
standing achievement within a few

years, only himself to be hounded out of
the whole continent by a fortuitous link
with the Gouzenko spy case in 1946.
Here, when he was at the summit of his
career, he was most in need of the
friends of whom his own ambition had
deprived him. It took twenty-five years
for Canada to make amends for her be¬
havior to this ruthless benefactor: not
only had he built most of the barrier
against U.S. infiltration, but he had also
infiltrated in reverse, gaining circulation
for his news-magazine film series World
in Action in 6,000 American theaters,
thanks to the skill of his editor, Stuart

Le gg-

W hile the dark side of Grierson's
character affected only himself and
a few film personalities who were as¬

sociated with him, his positive gifts
brought international benefit. The fac¬
tual film had existed from 1896 alongside
the fiction film. Creativity was applied to
it first by Robert Flaherty and the team of
Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack,
and next in the Soviet silent film under
the influence of D. W. Griffith. As a stu¬
dent in the U.S.A. Grierson studied the
work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, com¬
pared it with that of Flaherty, and began
writing critiques, translating the French
word documentaire as a term for this new
category of film. For him the dull factual
•film was only for demonstration, for util¬
ity, for news reporting. It was the func¬
tion of documentary to fire the imagina¬
tion of the audience.

Back in Britain in 1927, Grierson found
a keen supporter in Stephen Tallents, for

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FILM COMMENT 59

whom next year he made DRIFTERS as a
public relations job for the Empire Mar¬
keting Board. But the introduction of the
sound film slowed him up. He knew
nothing about sound, and he and his col¬
leagues resented their imaginative se¬
quences of silent pictures being accom¬
panied on the sound track by lectures
and cafe music.

The situation was saved in 1934 by, of
all people, the French film technicians
whose jobs were being taken from them
by the refugees from the new Nazi film
industry. Thrown out of France, like a
baby with the bath water, was Alberto
Cavalcanti, the brilliant Brazilian whom
the astute Grierson swept into his em¬
ploy for the next three years at a very
modest salary. Grierson was an uncanny
picker of potential talent. Cavalcanti
found himself surrounded by a crew
who had joined Grierson straight from
college, and whose gifts and keenness
stimulated Cavalcanti from the first day:
Basil Wright, John Taylor, Edgar Anstey,

Arthur Elton, Stuart Legg, Harry Watt,
and the rest.

Cavalcanti took over the burden of
much of the producing, making innum¬
erable experiments with sound, while
Grierson was able to give more time to
facing the world outside. With his skill at
writing and public speaking, Grierson
used the commercial screen where he
could while he built up the nontheatrical
audience in schools and colleges, hospi¬
tals, institutes, factories, and association
meetings—until during the war it came
almost to rival in size the audience of the
commercial theaters, which approached
twenty million a week.

The expansion of the work led Grier¬
son to move out of the confines of the
GPO film unit in 1937 and to set up Film
Center, a consultative body formed to
coordinate the interest in public relations
films of the big industrial groups. Shell
Oil, Imperial Chemical Industries, and
the Gas, Light and Coke Company/ as
well as the dominion and colonial gov¬

ernments. All these groups were clamor¬
ing to climb on the documentary band¬
wagon, and Grierson naturally wanted
his boys to remain in charge of these ex¬
tended opportunities.

Following a conversation on commer¬
cial film financing which I had with him
in August 1936, his periodical World Film
News in January 1937 published an ex¬
pose of the vagaries of the current
sources of film finances. Two weeks later
the insurance companies of the City of
London, which, spurred on by Korda's
efforts, had been lavishly investing their
money in British fiction films, panicked
at the adverse possibilities of the second
Quota Act, now overdue, and withdrew
their support. An appalling slump took
over until the Act was passed more than
a year later. Meanwhile the documen¬
tary movement continued to boom, and
Cavalcanti, who had looked longingly
toward the fiction film studios since his
arrival in 1934, was now busier than ever
in charge of the GPO Film Unit. Not a
word of this in the Sussex book.

I kept subsequent conversations with
Grierson on a lighter note during that
hungry year. In due course within the
year he went on his travels as consultant
to the Imperial Regulations Trust by the
agency of Sir Stephen Tallents, reporting
from Canada, Australia, and New Zea¬
land, and in 1939 setting up the National
Film Board of Canada.

Grierson was no longer to dominate
the movement in Britain, and was re¬
placed in production by Cavalcanti and
Wright (the latter also ably stepping into
his shoes as a critic and lecturer). Now
also the exceptional Hunphrey Jennings,
spurned by Grierson, was ready to
emerge as Cavalcanti's most accom¬
plished trainee.

T here was a dread of imminent war in
the minds of the public. The renewal
of the Quota Act artificially reopened the
studios. American films guaranteed the
supply of programs for the commercial
cinemas. There was continuing support
for the documentary, and the non¬
theatrical audience went on growing.
But if war had been avoided, the decline
of documentary might have happened
anyhow. There was gaining ground
among our ruling caste an extraordinary
acceptance of fascist thinking, which in
September 1939 manifested itself by ad¬
vocating the closing down of all cinemas
as constituting an unpatriotic diversion,
and as being death-traps in air raids.
And stopping production would provide
an easy way of drafting a whole industry
into the armed forces. To hell with public
opinion and morale, for the nontheatri¬
cal audience was considered equally ex¬
pendable. In a few weeks of hard lobby -

*In the Belgian book on documentary Le Cinema etses
hommes, my film version of Patrick Hamilton's Gas¬
light is described as a documentary sponsored by the
Gas, Light and Coke Company.

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60 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

ing we managed to rout this element
from the newly-founded Ministry of In¬
formation.

From May 1940, when for more than a
year the British Commonwealth was fac¬
ing Nazi-Fascism alone, every available
film craftsman in and out of uniform was
beginning to work on the widest spec¬
trum of filmmaking in the greatest quan¬
tity yet known in Britain. This spectrum
extended from the dullest factual film to
ultra-escapist fiction. How much of it
came within the confines of documen¬
tary is difficult to assess, but these doc-
umentaries.projected the most direct
propaganda, influential at home and
abroad. The inspiration in their making
derived undoubtedly from the Grier-
son-Cavalcanti stable, though Caval¬
canti, as an alien from a neutral country,
was forced to leave the unit, now re¬
named the Crown Film Unit. Invited to
produce for Michael Balcon at Ealing
Studios (where Harry Watt joined him in
1942), he returned to the commercial
filmmakers, who now voluntarily
worked under the guidance of Jack Bed-
dington at the Ministry of Information
throughout the war.

Two points not in the book should be
borne in mind. In wartime the national
audience is far more sensitive and
deeper in its emotion and thinking than
in peacetime. Anyone seeing wartime
films cold in peacetime for the first time
has to use superhuman judgment to ap¬
preciate their original impact; a film
which in wartime induced hysteria and
fainting fits went on playing as an enter¬
taining thriller for fifteen years after the
war was over. And the second point: in
showing to neutral audiences British es¬
capist entertainment that had been made
since the war began, we refuted enemy
lies about the desperate conditions
under which the British were living. If
the charges were true, how could we be
making entertainments like this?

So often through the book there come
allusions to the lofty attitude of the doc¬
umentary boys toward their colleagues
in commercial entertainment that one
must draw attention to this fact: while
some of the finest documentaries made
by the film units of the armed forces were
the work of peacetime commercial film¬
makers—like Carol Reed, David Mac¬
donald, and the Boulting brothers—none
of the documentary group succeeded in
making an outstanding fiction film,
however realistic it tried to be. (This has
not been the case since the introduction
of postwar television in Britain and other
countries.) Before the war there seems to
have been an inhibition within docu¬
mentary circles against the use of acting
as being phony in a situation of realism.

One logical reason for the decline of
the original documentary movement in
Britain after the war was economic. Na¬
tional effort, almost amounting to volun¬

tary nationalization, was taboo in peace¬
time. The Ministry of Information closed
down. Costs rose alarmingly. Theaters
returned to double-feature programs.
The nontheatrical audience dwindled.
And in the postwar documentaries there
no longer existed the built-in urgency of
the need for human survival. The nation
was tired and wanted to relax. Film had
proved itself a great weapon in war;
without war's justification of expendi¬
ture, its appeal slackened. Yet the
movement itself did not wholly fail.

New sponsors arose (like British
Transport and the National Coal Board at
home), while abroad Government agen¬
cies, often with Film Center and com¬

mercial sponsors, set up and trained na¬
tive film units to give their films an indi¬
genous character. So while the Conser¬
vatives closed down the Crown Film
Unit in 1952 on grounds of economy (but
really to encourage private enterprise),
the movement survived in television and
internationally. What is important is
that, whatever they look like, the films
should have something to say. They
should not lapse back into the former
boredom of the commercial "interest
picture."

The study in depth of this subject is yet
to be written. Meanwhile this volume
supplies a readable and decorative chap¬
ter for the layman. VC

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FILM COMMENT 61

JOHN HANHARDT
REPLIES TO
AMOS VOGEL

A recurring contention in Amos
Vogel's four "Independents"
columns devoted to "A History of
the American Avant-Garde Cinema" is
that the exhibition attempts to impose a
point of view on the avant-garde—a
point of view that distorts its history and
violates the true quality of its achieve¬
ment. Vogel appears to consider himself
custodian and protector of this quality,
since he offers no concrete descriptions
(other than vague conjectures) of what it
is. It is made clear in the exhibition's

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but were
afraid
to ask

catalogue—and it is implicit in any en¬
deavor of this kind—that what is offered
is a point of view. Any exhibition, be it
based on a single artist or a period in
time, has to make a selection and deter¬
mine a specific context in which to pre¬
sent it.

Vogel admits that costs are a factor in
how many films can be presented in such
an endeavor. But it's not enough to say,
as he does, that thirty programs are more
appropriate, or that thousands of inde¬
pendent films have been produced over
the past thirty years. Rather, it is the re¬
sponsibility of the organizers of a
traveling exhibit to, on one level, prepare
an exhibition that is economically feasi¬
ble to produce and distribute effectively.
This also means that it must be within
the financial means of a variety of in¬
stitutions, with and without film pro¬
grams and personnel knowledgeable of
the avant-garde film. These and other
considerations led to the decision to em¬
brace thirty years, 1943-1972, of avant-
garde film making within seven ninety-
minute programs. It is impossible to re¬
produce thirty years of filmmaking; but it
is possible to present a critical selection
of important work, arranged chronologi¬
cally and reflective of the achievement of
the avant-garde cinema—and to make
clear that this is a selection.

The catalogue makes this clear in
many ways. One is by presenting a
"Chronology" which lists, in addition to
the films contained in the programs, a
selection of work created during each
year covered by the exhibition. Included
in this listing are certain key events and
organizations (such as the founding of
the Art in Cinema Film Society and
Cinema 16) which supported and pro¬
moted this cinema. Also, the introduc¬
tions to this section and to the
"Catalogue List" make clear that a great
many films were produced and could not
be shown. The filmographies and bib¬
liographies (which list books by Parker
Tyler and Vogel) and the film distribu¬
tion sources encourage the viewer to
pursue the subject in a variety of direct¬
ions.

A nother part of Vogel's argument is
that the very institutions he iden¬
tifies as being a party to this exhibition
transform it from "A History" to "The
History." That this transformation may
have occurred in Vogel's mind is not the
fault of the exhibition or exhibitors. First
of all, I am sure no one considers every
exhibition prepared under the auspices
of the American Federation of the Arts in
painting, sculpture, photography, or
graphics, as being "The History", of the
subject of that particular exhibit. And
while many people were consulted dur¬
ing the preparation of the program, I
alone am responsible for this selection.
Suffice it to say that the National En¬

dowment for the Arts supports many
exhibits reflecting a variety of points of
view. The Museum of Modern Art was
one of the museums to present the
exhibition—and its resources were an
important source of information, as were
those of Anthology Film Archives—but
this most clearly does not, nor is it
claimed to, "sanctify" the film selection
or catalogue. It does not, in other words,
represent their definition of this cinema.

Vogel also brings up the Whitney
Museum of American Art, which is
identified in the catalogue's preface as
the institution where I am Curator of
Film and Video. Vogel appears to be
under the delusion that this exhibition is

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62 JANUARY-FEBRUARY1977

based on the Whitney Museum's New
American Filmmakers Series. This is
simply not the case. He also accuses me
of "liquidating" (a particularly objec¬
tionable word) David Bienstock's
achievement. The establishment of the
New American Filmmakers Series is
cited in the Chronology as an important
event and Bienstock's name and ac¬
complishment is always clearly ac¬
knowledged by me in my capacity as
Head of the Whitney's Film and Video
Department. Vogel in this and other col¬
umns seems to feel that, because I do not
present the same films as Bienstock, I am
violating his accomplishment. Bienstock
was dedicated to exploring the New
American Cinema, and his programs re¬
flected his point of view, as my programs
reflect my interests and commitment to
independent film. I have made clear on
many occasions my respect for
Bienstock's achievement and I believe I
am continuing in the same spirit of
commitment to independent film.

New York University's Department of
Cinema Studies, described by Vogel as
the "Academic Fountainhead of Formal
Cinema in America," is criticized for
being a part of this exhibition. A selec¬
tion of graduate students prepared the
program notes, and the filmographies
and bibliographies of individual artists in
the program. These and other students
will be available to accompany the
exhibition when it tours. This institution
was chosen to contribute to the exhibi¬
tion because it has a uniquely extensive
graduate program in the study of
avant-garde film. Its faculty and stu¬
dents study and have written on a wide
range of work, and not only the "struc¬
tural" film. The fact that a formal method
is encouraged in the study of film does
not preclude its effectiveness and value
in appreciating the full history and range
of accomplishment in avant-garde
filmmaking. Vogel does not do justice to
the program notes by quoting phrases
out of context and then claiming that
these words "substitute for under¬
standing." I do not understand what
Vogel means here since he has not taken
the trouble to define his terms and pre¬
sent his argument cogently, let alone
make clear his understanding of what
was written in the catalogue.

Tn criticizing the selection of films
-■■Vogel presents a breakdown of each of
the seven programs in terms of what he
calls "Structural/Formal Cinema". Vogel
categorizes Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage,
Marie Menken, Jonas Mekas, and Bruce
Baillie as "structural" filmmakers. I am
not sure what it means to call these art¬
ists structural filmmakers, nor is it made
any clearer by refering to other avant-
garde "tendencies" as "surrealist,
abstract, lyrical, expressionist,
'mythological' " without defining those

terms. This is complicated by the fact
that the terms apparently do not fit pre¬
vious definitions. Vogel concludes that
the exhibition presents an "inexorable
progression toward the structural formal
cinema as the inevitable outcome of the
American avant-garde movement." The
structural film is an important part of the
avant-garde's history, but nowhere am I
implying that the films of the final pro¬
gram are the "outcome" of the previous
ones, anymore than I am proclaiming the
end of the avant-garde in 1972.

Vogel claims that my essay, "The
Medium Viewed: The American
Avant-Garde Film," rewrites history.
My essay is not a history of the avant-
garde, and is not presented as such. It is
a consideration of this cinema in relation
to the commercial film, narrative tradi¬
tions, and twentiety century art, while
locating origins in the European avant-
gardes; a summary of critical and
theoretical texts I consider of particular
importance and which I relate to the
dominant historiographic representa¬
tions of film history; and a consideration
of some major theoretical, critical, aes¬
thetic, and historical contexts and issues
raised by the avant-garde film. It clearly
expresses a point of view and priorities
of interest but does not deny the exis¬
tence of others. I wish Vogel had read the
essay with greater care and discussed the
thrust and subject of the argument rather
than simply listing names out of context
with no consideration of how they were
used. He makes claims for the essay
which it does not make and fails to see it
as part of an entire catalogue of informa¬
tion and interpretation.

■

While I am happy to see Bernard
Herrmann celebrated in your pages
(September-October), I must take issue
with author John Broeck's penultimate
statement: "That the music he wrote was
oftentimes better than the films it ac¬
companied is of no consequence." This,
simply is not true. Indeed, one senses
from viewing the films he scored in just
the last seven years (a thing, incidental¬
ly, Broeck appears not to have done: his
article looks to have been compiled after
a visit to a well-stocked record store) that
Herrmann knew time was running out
and was bound and determined to leave
his mark on whatever piece of junk came
along. My God, I mean, IT'S alive!??

The scores seem to have been written
mainly to draw attention to Herrmann.
His ego got the best of him, as evidenced
by his remark (in the September 1976
High Fidelity) that "A composer writes a
score for a picture, and he gives it life. . .
[Hitchcock] only finishes a picture sixty
percent. I have to finish it for him."
When a filmmusic composer starts think¬
ing like that, retirement is definitely in
or der. —Dan Bates

GREAT ARTIST
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The intimate and
_ _ __ - shocking story of

FILM GODDESS S H

Leni Riefenstahl

GLENN B. INFIELD

An uncompromising look at
the woman whose films
helped create the myth of the
Third Reich, whose sense of
drama and destiny mes¬
merized Germany as Hitler
climbed to power. "Reward¬
ing and illuminating."

—Judith Crist
Photographs. $9.95

T. Y. CROWELL 666 Fifth Avenue.

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FILM COMMENT 63

The Directors Guild of America an¬
nounces the formation of a Speakers
Referral Service. Directors of feature
films, documentaries, television drama
and comedy, news, sports, commercials
and other media forms will be available
for campus visits and speaking engage¬
ments across the country starting in early
1977. Speakers will be booked on a fee
basis, with a share of proceeds going to
the Guild's Educational and Benevolent
Foundation. Further information may be
obtained by writing David Shepard, Spe¬
cial Projects Officer, Directors Guild of
America, 7950 Sunset Boulevard, Hol¬
lywood CA 90046. 213/653-8052.

The Whitney Museum's New Ameri¬
can Filmmakers Series has begun its
15-week winter program. Several series
of films will be presented as well as video
selections and live performances incor¬
porating film and video. For more infor¬
mation contact: Mark Segal, Whitney
Museum of American Art, 945 Madison
Avenue, New York NY 10021. 212/794-
0600.

The Jacksonville Film Festival will be
held in Jacksonville, Florida on April
20-24. Deadline for entry is March 1.
Films entered must have been completed
since January, 1976 and should not be
over 30 minutes long. Prize money will
be awarded. For more information write:
Jeff Driggers, Jacksonville Film Festival,
Jacksonville Public Library, 122 North
Ocean Street, Jacksonville FL 32202.
904/633-3748.

New Directors/New Films is a series of
feature films by promising directors from
the United States and other parts of the
world whose work is not yet well-known
here. Presented jointly by the Depart¬
ment of Film at The Museum of Modern
Art and The Film Society of Lincoln
Center, the series will take place on April
15-29 at the Museum in New York City.
Persons interested in submitting films
should contact Joanne Koch, The Film
Society of Lincoln Center, 1865 Broad¬
way, New York NY 10023 (212/765-5100)
or Adrienne Mancia, The Museum of
Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New
York NY 10019 (212/956-4211).

Ken Russell fans are invited to contri¬
bute any memorabilia they may have
pertaining to the British director or to his
wife Shirley (costume designer) to the
Ken-Shirley Russell Collection. Any
material received will be indexed. Con¬
tact: Bernard Mylonas, 142 Mill Lane,
London NW6 1TG, England.

The Nontheatrical Film Distributors
Association has just published a bro¬
chure that explains and clarifies the is¬
sues of copyright and fair use as it
applies to feature films in 16mm. Of
interest to media students, film pro¬
grammers, libraries, teachers and others
who use 16mm feature films; copies of
the brochure are availabe without cost by
sending a self-addressed envelope to:
Copyright Brochure, NFDA, 40 West
57th Street, New York NY 10019. 212/
977-9700.

The Corporation for Public Broad¬
casting awards two-year grants to appli¬
cants from minority groups. Judging oc¬
curs in June for grants effective in July.
For information write: Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, Minority Training
Grants, 1111 16th Street NW, Washing¬
ton DC 20036.

The National Endowment for the Arts

has announced a 13-week Work Experi¬
ence Internship Program to be given in
both the spring and summer terms of
1977. Activities are planned to acquaint
students with grant-making procedures,
policy development and administration.
Write: Intern Program Officer, Mail Stop
557, National Endowment for the Arts,
Washington DC 20506.

CONTRIBUTORS

James Bouras is a lawyer on the staff of
the Motion Picture Association of
America. Mary Corliss runs the Film
Stills Archive at the Museum of Modern
Art. Thorold Dickinson is a key figure in
the British cinema, for his work in docu¬
mentaries (often with John Grierson),
fiction films (gaslight, the queen of
spades), and film education (at the Slade
School of Fine Art, London). Brendan
Gill writes on the Broadway theater for
The New Yorker , of which he is an editor.
Roger Greenspun teaches film at Rut¬
gers University, and is the film critic of
Penthouse. Richard Koszarski recently
assembled a program of early American
films for the Walker Art Center (Min¬
neapolis), and is preparing a sequel to
Hollywood Directors , which ne edited for
Oxford University Press. Robert Levine
has worked for Variety , Show , and The
Independent Film Journal. Michael Press-
ler teaches in the Department of English
at the University of Connecticut. Charles
Silver runs the Film Study Center at the
Museum of Modern Art, and is the au¬
thor of The Western Film (Pyramid).
Elliott Stein has written fiction, criti¬
cism, libretti, and (for Rolling Stone) a
memoir of King Kong.

THIS ISSUE'S FILMS IN 16MM

BONNIE AND CLYDE (Penn)—AB, ARC,
ARG, BUD, CIN, CLW, CON, FC, ICS,
MOD, MOT, NAT, ROA, SEL, SWA,
TWY, UF, WC, WEL, WHO, WIL

DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET
(Fuller)—AB

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (Capra)—IVY

McCABE AND MRS. MILLER (Altman)—
WB

MORE— C5

ON THE WATERFRONT (Kazan)—AB,
ARC, ARG, BUD, CIN, CLW, CON, FC,
ICS, MOD, MOT, NAT, ROA, SEL,
SWA, TWY, WC, WEL, WHO, WIL

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (Fuller)—
SEL, WC, WIL

SHADOW OF A DOUBT (Hitchcock)—
CIN, TMC, TWY, UNI

AB: Audio Brandon Films (Macmillan). ARC:

Arcus Films. ARG: Argosy Films. BUD: Budget

Films. C5: Cinema 5. CIN: Cine Craft Company.

CLW: Clem Williams Films. CON: Contemporary

Films (McGraw Hill). FC: The Film Center. ICS:

Institutional Cinema Service. IVY: Ivy Film.

MOD: Modern Sound Films. MOT: Mottas Films.

NAT: National Film Service. ROA: Roa's Films.

SEL: Select Film Library. SWA: Swank Motion

Pictures. TWY: Twyman Films. UF: United Films.

UNI: Universal 16. WB: Warner Bros. WC:

Westcoast Films. WHO: Wholesome Film Center.

WIL: Willoughby-Peerless.

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FILM

COMMENT

contents of
back issues

FILM COMMENT sells single copies of back issues, bound
reprinted volumes, annotated indexes, and a filmography of
Hollywood cameramen. This leaflet lists the table of con¬
tents of each issue through volume 12 number 6. Back
issues are in constant demand and many are out of print, so
order promptly to avoid disappointment.

Single copies of back issues are original copies, unmarked
and undamaged.

Reprinted volumes are bound in paper, printed on archival
quality matte paper, with a slight loss of definition in
photographs. Otherwise they are identical to the original
magazines. Reprints are available of volumes 1 and 2
complete. (Volume 3, previously offered, is now out of print.)

A cumulative index to volumes 1 through 8 plus supple¬
mentary indexes to volumes 9, 10, 11, 12 are available as a
set covering the years 1962-76. Material is indexed by
subject, film title, author, and book title. Completely anno¬
tated.

The Men with the Movie Cameras, edited by Richard
Koszarski and published in June 1972, includes 7$ filmog¬
raphies of Hollywood cameramen, fully illustrated. (60
filmographies were previously published in vol 8 no 2.)

TO ORDER, complete coupon and send with payment, US
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vol. 1 no. 1 (Spring 1962) (out of print)

The Experimental Film

Thoughts On Movement

Film Festival in New York

The Teen-Age Box Office

Josh Logan—Watermelons and Sex

ANTIGONE

A Report On the Films of Rudy Burckhardt:

A view of Burckhardt

Notes on Ruby Burckhardt. . . Motion Seen
Adventures in the Sin Game
On Making Sunday
Anti-Negro Propaganda in Films
Prospects of Cleopatra
stars

The Documentary Film Group of Chicago
MOTHER JOANNA OF THE ANGELS
Symposium
The Experimental Film

Joseph Blanco
Hilary Harris
Emily S. Jones
Gretchen Weinberg
Barbara Miller
John Gallea

P. Adams Sitney
Mary Batten
David Moller
Dan Drasin
P. Jay Sidney
Owen Rachleff
Gordon Hitchens
William D. Routt
Gordon Hitchens

Joseph Blanco

vol. 1 no. 2 (Summer 1962)

Operation narqo, A Work in Progress

The Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Back to the Greeks

The Eighth Flaherty Film Seminar

Nuderama

Towards an Abstract Cinema . . . Not Yet
An Interview With Jose Luis Font
A Film Society Takes Root
Demonstration and Discussion
The Films of Mary Ellen Bute:

Beyond Audio-Visual Space
Actuality and Abstraction
The DEFA Studio for Animated Films

(out of print)

Lionel Ziprin
Edith Laurie
Harry Feldman
Gordon Hitchens
David Moller
John Craddock
Jon Katz
Maggie Dent
Maxine Haleff

Gregory Markopoulos
Mary Batten

New Documentary Goal Stewart Wilensky

Stereotypes of Negroes in Film Robert Williams

Recurrent Themes in East German Film Gordon Hitchens

Whither the Charles? Joseph Blanco

vol. 1 no. 3 (undated)

Interview with George Stevens, Jr., of U.S.I.A.

Gordon Hitchens

Notes From the Venice Film Festival Edith Laurie

Another Kind of Cinema Marcel Marien

Triumph of the Symbol Gregory Markopoulos

Freedom and Film compiled from the A.C.L.U. annual report
The San Francisco Film Festival 1962

John Fell, Richard Kobritz, Frank Smith

Ron Rice and His Work

Comments on new Books

The Museum of Modern Art Film Library

Mary Batten
Robert Windeler

Gregory Markopoulos

(out of print)

Mary Batten
Tanya Osadca
Gordon Hitchens

Clara Hoover
Gordon Hitchens

Anna de Varis
Peter Goode, Robert Connolly
Jose Luis Torres
Tats Yoshiyama
Mrs. Louis E. Schecter
Edith Laurie
Carol Brightman

(out of print)

vol. 1 no. 4 (undated)

An Interview with Ephraim London
More About Novosti
Film Appreciation in Dixie
Chicago’s Midwest Film Festival
An Interview with Hugh Hurd

AN AFFAIR OF THE SKIN

Film Reviews:

ELECTRA

THE FOUR DAYS OF NAPLES
The San Sebastian Festival in Spain
Film News From the Fiftieth State
Movies Without a Blush
Must Movies Talk to Teach?

The Chicago Film Scene
Book Reviews

vol. 1 no. 5 (Summer 1963)

Interviews with Two American Directors:

James Blue Mary Batten

Frank Perry William Bayer, Jr.

The Business of Making Art Films George Schiffer

42nd Street Clara Hoover and Bill Troy

On Approaching the Film as Art Alan Casty

Film Festivals:

San Sebastian Edith Laurie

Cannes Nelly Kaplan

Ottawa Edith Laurie

Midwest Gordon Hitchens

Ann Arbor George Manupelli

New York Film In and Out Herman and Gretchen Weinberg

Student Film Workshop Sol Worth

Place of Cinema in N. Y. Public Library George Freedley

Film Reviews:

sy 2 Mary Batten

my name is ivan Peter Goode

Issues Overlooked Guest Contributor, Morris L. Ernst

vol. 1 no. 6 (Fall 1963)

Film Festivals:

New York
Locarno

Flaherty Seminar
Mannheim
Bergamo
San Francisco
Pula
Midwest
Edinburgh
Exploitation Films
Three Italian Films

The Law and the Use of Music in Film
Michael Cacoyannis

(out of print)

Gordon Hitchens
Clara Hoover
Austin F. Lamont
Gordon Hitchens
Clara Hoover
John Fell and Joan Reynertson
Fitzroy Davis
William Routt and Sidney Huttner
Clara Hoover and Edith Laurie
Frank Ferrer
Robert Connolly
George Schiffer
Athena Dallas

-Toward a New Narrative Form in Motion Pictures

Gregory Markopoulos

Reflections on Making sculptor Alvin Fiering

Film, The Rival of Theatre Edith Laurie

Book Reviews
Letters to the Editor

Issues Overlooked Guest Contributor, Morris L. Ernst

In Memorian (for President Kennedy)

vol. 2 no. 1 (Winter 1963 - 1964) (out of print)

Issues Overlooked Guest Contributor. Morris L. Ernst

Britain’s Busiest Angry Young Man (Tony Richardson)

David Moller

The Festival of the People

Summary Gordon Hitchens

Statement By Robert Gardner at the Opening Ceremony
dead birds Robert Gardner

A Savage Paradigm Margaret Mead

Some Thoughts on Film Technique William C. Jersey. Jr.

Films of Social Comment Prof. Eric Barnouw

The Long Courtship: Films of Social Inquiry in Television

Ray Sipherd

FILM COMMENT Anniversary Awards
Privacy, Publicity and Unfair Competition:

The Business of Making an Art Film
More Than Nostalgia
- Background to point of order!

^ The Point of View in point of order!
Film Reviews
Book Reviews
Letters to the Editor

George Schiffer
Edward Crawford
David T. Bazelon
Emile de Antonio

vol. 2 no. 2 (undated)

The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth
About Exploitation Films

Barry Mahon interviewed by Gordon Hitchens
Children’s Film and Screen Education Tony Hodgkinson

The Maysles Brothers and ' Direct Cinema" Maxine Haleff

Something Special Donald S. Hillman

Film in the Chinese People s Republic

Candid Cannes Max Weinberg

Interview with Shirley Clarke Harriet Polt

The Benshi Tats Yoshiyama

Cinematic Politics Yale Udoff

The Sixth Annual American Film Festival Paula Zweifach

Film Making in Bulgaria Edith Laurie

The Boston University Film School Austin F. Lamont

Film Censorship in the Nation’s Capital

A Statement by Michael F. Mayer
Jurors Named for FILM COMMENT Anniversary Awards
Film Reviews
Book Reviews
Letters to the Editor

vol. 2 no. 3 (Summer 1964)

Anniversary Awards—Announcement of
Ernest Pintoff, Fireman
Survey Among Unsuccessful Applicants
Film Grants
Moravia on Italian Film
The Death of Mickey Mouse
Carl Foreman In Israel
Toward Visual Cinema
Some Good New European Features
Notes on the Fordham Film Conference
Film Reviews

THE ORGANIZER
THE SILENCE

Book Reviews

Harlow: An Intimate Biography
Copyrights

The Contemporary Cinema
The Cleopatra Papers
Letters to the Editor

vol. 2 no. 4 (Fall 1964)

Odyssey from Hollywood to New York
The Second New York Film Festival
The Achievement of Roberto Rossellini
Thoughts on Cinema Verite and a Discussion with
The Maysles Brothers
The British Film Institute
Footnote
Newsom on Film

New Changes on the Spanish Film Scene
Film Scholars at The New York Film Festival
Impressions at Venice
The Films of Bruce Baillie
Random Notes During a Two Week Lecture Tour
of The United States Gregory Markopoulos

Motion Picture Censorship and the Exhibitor Barbara Scott
Book Reviews

(out of print)

Winners

Stuart A. Selby
for the Ford Foundation

Robert Connolly
Harriet Polt
Uri Oren
Kirk Smallman
Gideon Bachman
Stephen Taylor

Yale Udoff
Stephen Taylor

Harry Feldmar.
George Schiffer
James Blue
Harry Feldman

(out of print)

Carl Lerner
Andrew Sarris
Alan Casty

James Blue
Tony Hodgkinson
Gene Stavis

Edith Laurie
Robert Steele
Carl Lerner
Harriet Polt

vol. 3 no. 1 (Winter 1964 - 1965)

Interview with a Legend
Biographical Sketch of Leni Riefenstahl
"The Future is Entirely Ours"

TRIUMPH OF THE WILL

A Comeback for Leni Riefenstahl?

Can the Will Triumph?

The Chronic Crisis in West German Film
Clean Germans and Dirty Politics
Film Marathon at Mannheim
Notes on the Documentary Film Week in

(out of print)

Gordon Hitchens

Ulrich Gregor
Robert Gardner
Jules Cohen
Martin S. Dworkin
Gordon Hitchens
Mannheim

WOMAN IN THE DUNES

Book and Film Review Adrienne Mancia

A Conversation with Two Japanese Film Stars
Review Kirk Bond

Thoughts on woman in the dunes Clara Hoover

Book Reviews
Film Reviews

the red desert Jules Cohen

nothing but A man F. William Howton

bay of angels Dolores Hitchens

San Francisco Forecast: Continued Fog and Drizzle

Harriet Polt

Letters to the Editor

vol. 3 no. 2 (Spring 1965)

Three American Film Makers

Robert Rossen and the Filming of lilith
Michael Roemer and Robert Young
Film Makers of nothing but a man
One Man’s Truth
An Interview of Richard Leacock
Thirty Years of Social Inquiry
An Interview of Willard Van Dyke
Filmography of Willard Van Dyke
Letters from the river
The Narration of the river
I Prefer the Sun to the Rain

THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG
History and all that Jazz
The Isolated Hero of Ingmar Bergman
Book Reviews
Letters From Readers

(out of print)

Saul B. Cohen

James Blue
Harrison Engle

Willard Van Dyke
Pare Lorentz
Jacques Demy
Stephen Chodes

Birgitta Steene

vol. 3 no. 3 (Summer 1965) (out of print)

A Story About People—That’s My Clay

Ralph Nelson Interviewed by Alan Casty
Preminger's Two Periods, Solo and Studio Andrew Sarris

To Have or not To Have a Film Festival Edith Laurie

The Literary Sophistication of Francois Truffaut Michael Klein

Three Films from Paris
New Perils Awaiting the Serious Drinker
TOKYO OLYMPIAD
A Letter from Peru
Trends in the Short Film
Editing Cinema Verite
A Report from Detroit on 16mm in ’65!

Frederick Wellington
Howard Junker
Cid Corman
Edward Dew, Jr.
Hilmar Hoffmann
Patricia Jaffe
Willard Ewajd

The Film Lectures of Slavko Vorkapich Carl Lerner

Sex and Dr Strangelove F. Anthony Macklin

Civil Liberties News

Films News from the Museum of Modern Art
Book Reviews
Letters to the Editor

vol. 3 no. 4 (Fall 1965) (out of print)

Man’s Right to Know before He Dies
A Powerful New Anti-War Film from Britain, the war game
Peter Watkins Discusses His Suppressed Nuclear Film

James Blue and Michael Gill
Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Art of Directing
Greatest Story Ever Told by a Communist

Maryvonne Butcher

To a Pope Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini Interviewed by James Blue

-~'- i5ar Manipulation of the Masses Through the Nazi Film

Hilmar Hoffmann

GERMANY awake! Erwin Leiser

Hidden Cameras and Human Behaviour

Allen Funt Interviewed by Harrison Engle
Similarity with a Difference Robert Connolly

That Meeting at Dartmouth Anthony Hodgkinson

Jail. Freedom, and the Screenwriting Profession Alvah Bessie
Statements by Dore Schary and John Howard Lawson
The American People and Freedom on the Screen

Herbert Biberman

The Blacklist—What is Was Like and Why it May Return:

A Review and discussion of John Henry Faulk's
fear on trial F. William Howton

Pornography in Film F. William Howton

Book Reviews

vol. 4 no. 1 (Fall 1966) (out of print)

The Film Comment Foundation
i^/The FILM COMMENT Foundation

Propoganda Films about the War in Vietnam
Viet Cong Film =1. Visuals 0

Viet Cong Film =1. Narration

Erwin Leiser

Viet Cong Film = 2, Visuals and Narration
U. S. Army Film why Vietnam?, Narration

North Vietnamese Feature, la tempete se leve (the rising storm)

DAYS OF PROTEST

Introduction to while brave men die
A Statement by Fulton Lewis, III
Biographical Sketch of Fulton Lewis, III
Biographical Sketch of Donald Brice, Newscope, Inc.

Complete Transcript of while brave men die

The Man with the Movie Camera Herman G. Weinberg

Elia Kazan and the House Un-American Activities Committee

Roger Tailleur, Translated by Alvah Bessie
Report from Cannes Nelly Kaplan

"My Way of Working is in Relation to the Future”:

An Interview with Carl Dreyer
The Basic Demand of Life for Love
To Rescue gertrud
"I Was Born for the Cinema”:

A Conversation with Federico Fellini,

Book Reviews

vol. 5 no. 2 (Spring 1969) (out of print)

Destroyed American Film Collection in Florence Italy

Film in China Mark J. Scher

Documentary in Uzbekistan Malik Kayumov

Susumu Hani Interviewed by James Blue

Hani Filmography

Films in viemam

USIS Film Officer Interviewed by FILM COMMENT

U. S. Government Films on the Vietnamese War

Films from North Vietnam

Filmmaking Under the Bomb

Newsreel and Documentary

Photography in North Vietnam Ma Van Cuong

Book Reviews

Carl Lerner
Kirk Bond
Don Skoller

Irving Levine

vol. 4 nos. 2, 3 (Fall - Winter 1967)

_^USH to judgment, A Conversation with
Mark Lane and Emile De Antonio
Homo Americanus Louis Marcorelles

\ Complete Transcript of Sound-track of U. S. Information
’Nj'' Agency Film on President Kennedy— years of lightning,

DAYS OF DRUMS

The Kennedy Film at Warrenton Martin S. Dworkin

Background to The Kennedy Film
Use and Abuse of Stock Footage
Two Sides of The Civil Rights Coin

HOME FOR LIFE

“My Need To Express Myself in A Film”—

Interview with Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s persona, reviewed
Selected Short Subjects

Elmar Klos and Jan Kadar, Czech Directors of
SHOP ON MAIN STREET
Japanese Underground Film
^Direct Cinema
*^^The Films of Jean Rouch
V-^Jean Rouch in Interviews with James Blue and Jacqueline Veuve
The Films of David Wark Griffith Richard J. Meyer

Book Reviews
Letters to the Editor

vol. 4 no. 4 (Summer 1968)

Erwin Panofsky, A Tribute
Satyajit Ray

Ray Filmography and Biography
A New Film on the Genius of Eugene O’Neill
A Statement on Experimental Work in Cinema

Herman G. Weinberg

Film and Catholicism:

The Legion of Decency Richard Corliss

Film and Catholicism:
every seventh child— A Panel Discussion
Jack Willis; Father John McLaughlin; Father Michael Allen;
Gordon Hitchens, Moderator

William Sloan

Erwin Leiser
Cecile Starr

Robert Steele
James Blue
James Blue

vol. 5 no. 3 (Fall 1969)

Lost Ones

The Study and Preservation of Films
At the Museum of Modern Art
“Les Allures du Cheval”

Eadweard James Muybridge’s Contribution
to the Motion Picture
In Memoriam

H. d’Abbadie d’Arrast 1897-1968 Herman G. Weinberg

The Serious Business of Being Funny Harold Lloyd

Basic Guides for Student Film Production Thomas J. Genelli
Two . . . But Not of a Kind

WARRENDALE and TITICUT FOLLIES
Television Station Breaks
A New Art Form
Television for Children
Socialist Style

A Report on the Bergamo Festival
Rise of The American Film
Book Reviews

Herman G. Weinberg
Lillian Gerard

Harlan Hamilton

Dr. Paul Bradlow

Richard J. Meyer

Rose Forman
Frank Nulf

vol. 5 no. 4 (Winter 1969 - 1970)

2001. A SPACE ODYSSEY

The Eternal Renewal Elie Flatto

The Comic Sense of 2001 F. A. Macklin

Bruce Conner

Two Sidney Poitier Films Maxine Elliston

Charlie Chaplin’s monsieur verdoux Press Conference

Accusations Against Charles Chaplin For Political and

Robert Gessner
Interviewed by James Blue

Robert Steele

Terry Hickey
Gene Phillips

Professor O. W. Reigel

Forrest Williams

(out of print)

Interviewed by Harrison Engle

Biographies of Panelists

vol. 5 no. 1 (Fall 1968)

Roman Polanski in New York
Polanski Biography and Filmography

Jerzy Skolimowski Interviewed by FILM COMMENT

Skolimowski Biography and Filmography
A Mosaic of Soviet Writings on the Film

Selected and translated by Stephen P. Hill
Inquisition in the Other Eden—

The Blacklisting of a Film Writer in the USSR

Eugene Gabrilovich

Gabrilovich Filmography

A Soviet Reporter’s View of Cinema in the Chinese People’s
Republic A. Zhelahovtsev

A Tribute to Boris Barnet Ellen Kusmina

A Tribute to Ivan Pyriev Mark Donskoy

Soviet Theatres: To Build or not To Build E. Zusman

Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors Serge Parajanov

Ordinary Fascism Erwin Leiser

Ivan the Terrible: A Peak in Darien Evelyn Gerstein

Istvan Szabo Interviewed by Bob Sitton

The Reckoning of a Miracle—An Analysis of

Czechoslovak Cinematography Antonin J. Liehm

The New Czech Film Kirk Bond

Czech Book Review

Animation from Zagreb Ronald Holloway

Moral Offenses

John Schlesinger, Social Realist
Schlesinger Filmography
Some Thoughts on Student Films
v \ Thn Mastery of Movement

' an appreciation of Max Ophuls
Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 6 no. 1 (Spring 1970)

Arthur Barron, The Self-Discovery of a

Documentary Filmmaker Interviewed by

Bernard Rosenberg and F. William Howton
Network Television and the Personal Documentary Arthur Barron
The Intensification of Reality Arthur Barron

Arthur Barron Filmography
Enslaved by the Queen of the Night
The Relationship of Ingmar Bergman to

E. T. A. Hoffman Robert Rosen

Young German Film reprinted from Der Spiegel

Boris Karloff—The Man Behind the Myth Lillian Gerard

^ Cornel Wilde, Producer/Director John Cohen

Ernst Lubitsch,

A Parallel to George Feydeau
Book Reviews

Herman G. Weinberg

vol. 6 no. 2 (Summer 1970)

My Three Powerfully Effective Commandments
The Snakeskin

Biography of Ingmar Bergman
Bibliography of Ingmar Bergman
Swedish Films at Sorrento
Greta Garbo’s Secret
Export or Die
The Young Swedish Cinema in Relation to Swedish
Film Tradition Rune Waldekranz

duet for cannibals Kirk Bond

As I Remember. . . Victor Sjostrom

_New Film Against Vietnam War From New York
University Students Dinitia Smith

Letters
Books

Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman

Peter Cowie
Carl-Eric Nordberg
Frederic Fleischer

(out of print)

Charles Silver
Andrew Sarris
Gene D. Phillips

Gary Carey
Kenneth Geist

^7

David Bordwell
Paul Jensen
Richard Koszarski
Molly Haskell
Stephen Farber
William Bechter

interviewed by Harriet Polt
Charles C. Hampton, Jr.

(out of print)

Richard Corliss
John Hanhardt

vol. 6 no. 3 (Fall 1970)

For a Fair Distribution of Film Wealth
Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1970
An Interview with Ken Russell
The Lady and The Director
Bette Davis and William Wyler
Carrie

J~">A n Interview with John Whitney
/A Discussion with John Whitney
Film Favorites
THE CIRCUS
FRANKENSTEIN
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
STAGE FRIGHT
LILITH

THE WILD BUNCH
Getting the Great Ten Percent
Milos Forman

Movies That Play For Keeps

vol. 6 no. 4 (Winter 1970 - 1971)

The Hollywood Screenwriter
George Axelrod and the Manchurian candidate
The Rise and Fall of the American West

Borden Chase interviewed by Jim Kitses

Confessions of a Frustrated Screenwriter Carl Foreman

Jules Furthman Richard Koszarski

Ben Hecht: A Sampler Steven Fuller

Script to Screen with Max Ophuls Howard Koch

The Career of Ring Lardner Jr. Kenneth Geist

Written on the Screen: Anita Loos Gary Carey

The Career of Dudley Nichols Paul Jensen

They Shaft Writers Don’t They?

James Poe interviewed by Michael Dempsey

The Many Voices of Donald Ogden Stewart Gary Carey

Preston Sturges in the Thirties Andrew Sarris

Screenwriters Symposium
Fifty Filmographies
Index

vol. 7 no. 1 (Spring 1971)

Yasujiro Ozu, A Biographical Filmography
Francois Truffaut, A Man Can Serve Two Masters
Bruce Baillie, An Interview
Visual Anthropology, Introduction
Toward an Anthropological Cinema
Ethnographic Film Production
Jorge Preloran, Interview
James Whale
Film Favorites
the searchers

IT'S GREAT TO BE ALIVE

Eleanor Perry, One Woman in Film, Interview

Kay Loveland and Estelle Changas

Lost And Found

Richard Koszarski, George Lobell, and Richard Corliss
Book Reviews

Anthology Film Archives, Melinda Ward vs Richard Corliss
Classified

vol. 7 no. 2 (Summer 1971) (out of print)

Front Lines

The Long Take Brian Henderson

F. W. Mumau, an introduction Gilberto Perez Guillermo

.—- Bernardo Bertolucci, an interview
Superfight

The Dovzhenko Papers
Roger Corman, the films of Roger Corman
* Roger Corman, an interview
Film Favorites,

MONKEY BUSINESS

TWO AFFAIRS TO REMEMBER

Willard Maas, an interview

Wind From The East, a review

Book Reviews

Classified

vol. 7 no. 4 (Winter 1971 - 1972)

Journals: Paris, Los Angeles
The Films of Billy Wilder
The Testament Of Jean Cocteau
Where Have All The Powers Gone?
-^Kubrick, interview
'""^Paranoia In Hollywood
Jacques Demy
,a Lubitsch In The Thirties
—- The Search For Lost Films, an interview
Film Favorites,

ALICE ADAMS
HAPPINESS

Critics, Robin Wood
Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 8 no. 1 (Spring 1972)

Journals: London, Paris, Los Angeles
• Notes on Film Noir

(out of print)

Donald Richie
David Bordwell

Margaret Mead
Jay Ruby
Tim Asch
Howard Suber
Paul Jensen

Andrew Sarris
Miles Kreuger

Mr. Film Noir Stays At The Table,
Robert Aldrich, an interview
Cine Cubano
klute: an analysis
Dziga Vertov
a Vertov Portfolio
The Vertov Papers
George Cukor, an interview
Film Favorites
seven women

Amos Vogel
James Childs
Marco Carynnyk
Richard Koszarski
Charles Goldman
Joe Adamson

Richard Corliss
George Semsel
Joan Mellen

(out of print)

Stephen Farber
George Amberg
Stanley Kauffmann
Gene Phillips
Paul Jensen
Graham Petrie
Andrew Sarris
David Shepard

Elliott Sirkin
Gary Carey
Foster Hirsch

Paul Schrader

Alain Silver
Pierre Sauvage
Robin Wood
David Bordwell

Marco Carynnyk
Gene Phillips

DEAD HEAT ON A MERRY-GO-ROUND

Critics, Otis Ferguson
Book Reviews
Letters

Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington

Stuart Byron
Gary Carey

SUNRISE
CITY GIRL
TABU

Orson Welles, an introduction
CITIZEN KANE
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
TOUCH OF EVIL
THE IMMORTAL STORY

Max Ophuls

" LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN

- CAUGHT

THE RECKLESS MOMENT
MADAME DE . . .

Books

Letters

Classified

vol. 7 no. 3 (Fall 1971)

Journals: Paris, Los Angeles
--John Ford, the late films of John Ford

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE

Molly Haskell
Richard Koszarski
Robin Wood
Mike Prokosch
David Bordwell
Stephen Farber
Terry Comito
Charles Silver
Andrew Sarris
Michael Kerbel
Gary Carey
William Paul
Foster Hirsch

(out of print)

Robin Wood
David Bordwell

THE CIVIL WAR

Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington

vol. 8 no. 2 (Summer 1972)

Journals: Paris, Stockholm, Los Angeles
~~ Elia Kazan’s America

Visiting Kazan, an interview Charles Silver and Joel Zuker

All Talking! All Singing! All Lubitsch!

Ernst Lubitsch in the Thirties—part II
Penelope Gilliatt, an interview
‘'-—’Special Supplement:

The Men With The Movie Cameras,

Sixty Filmographies
Passion, Death and Testament,

Carl Dreyer’s Jesus Film
—* The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur
Film Favorites

" 1 ^ IMITATION OF LIFE

Critics, Frank S. Nugent
Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 8 no. 3 (Sept. - Oct. 1972)

Journals: Cannes, Los Angeles, Paris
Charlie Chaplin: Faces and Facets

Gilberto Perez Guillermo, Gary Carey, William K. Everson,
William Paul, Stanley Kauffmann, David Denby,
Stephen Harvey, Foster Hirsch, Emily Sieger,
David Robinson and Michael Kerbel
Chronicler of Power, Franklin Schaffner,
an interview
Ingmar Bergman

Aspects of Cinematic Consciousness
John Wayne Talks Tough, an interview
Film Favorites

BIGGER THAN LIFE
RIVER OF NO RETURN

THE GROUP ..

Critics, Robert E. Sherwood
Books
Letters

Estelle Changas

Andrew Sarris
James Childs

Richard Koszarski

David Bordwell
Robin Wood

Michael McKegney
Bruce Henstell

Charles Silver,

Kenneth Geist
John Simon
Donald Skoller
Joe Mclnerney

Robin Wood
Richard McGuinness
Elliott Sirkin
John Schultheiss

(out of print)

vol. 8 no. 4 (Nov. - Dec. 1972)

Journals: London, Paris
Frank Capra Under Capracorn
Capra And Langdon
Capra And Riskin
Capra Today, an interview
Orson Welles: heart of darkness,
the introductory sequence to the unproduced film
The Voice And The Eye, a commentary on
the “Heart of Darkness” script Jonathan Rosenbaum

Stephen Handzo
Richard Leary
Richard Corliss
James Childs

A/

Women Directors, 150 Filmographies
The Hitchcock Dilemma, Lost In The Wood
A Fine Frenzy
Film Favorites

THE IRON HORSE

Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 9 no. 1 (Jan. - Feb. 1973)

Cinema Sex: from the kiss to deep throat
Blue Notes

Sex and Sexism in the Eroduction
Radley Metzger: aristocrat of the erotic, an interview

Richard Corliss

Censorship in London Verina Glaessner

Censorship in California Stephen Farber

Russ Meyer: the king of the nudies Roger Ebert

Russ Meyer: sex, violence and drugs—all in good fun,
an interview

An Evening with Meyer and Masoch, aspects of

Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 9 no. 5 (Sept. - Oct. 1973)

Journals: Cannes, Berlin, Los Angeles

Leo McCarey, from Marx to McCarthy Charles Silver

Advice to Readers and Critics Otis Ferguson

King Vidor, part 2 Raymond Durgnat

duel in the sun, the fountainhead, beyond the forest, ruby

GENTRY, MAN WITHOUT A STAR, WAR AND PEACE, SOLOMON AND SHEBA,
ENVOI

The Good Dumb Film,

the poseidon adventure Lawrence Shaffer

The Bad Smart Film, such good friends and up the sandbox

Elliott Sirkin

Book Reviews

vol. 9 no. 6 (Nov. - Dec. 1973) (out of print)

Journals: London, Paris, Los Angeles
.-—■Cinema Verite and Social Concerns Stephen Mamber

—j an American family, An American Film Eric Krueger

'\l Pat Loud, an interview Melinda Ward

The Making of an American family,

Susan Raymond, Alan Raymond and John Terry, an interview

Melinda Ward

Leni Riefenstahl, Artifice and truth in a world apart

Richard Meran Barsam
Robert Flaherty, The man in the iron myth Richard Corliss

Remembering Francis Flaherty Ricky Leacock

. Terrible Buildings, the world of Georges Franju Robin Wood

Stan berKowitzwv A|ajn ResnaiSj “Memory is kept alive with dreams” Peter Harcourt
Mafcaxmim/ TnwarH thp Adnft of the real. . . and over Amos Vogel

Richard Henshaw
George Kaplan
William Johnson

Stuart Byron

Richard Corliss
Brendan Gill
Donald Richie

vixen and venus in furs
Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 9 no. 2 (March - April 1973)

Journals: London, Paris, Los Angeles

Raymond Durgnat

Makavejev* Toward the edge of the real.
Book Reviews

vol. 10 no. 1 (Jan. - Feb.1974)

Journals: London, Paris, Los Angeles

Yakuza-Eiga: A Primer Paul Schrader

Something to do with Death, a fistful of Sergio Leone Leaving The Times Roger Greenspun

Richard T Jameson JSpAlain Resnais: Toward the certainty of doubt Peter Harcourt

v-^Film Noir: Visual Motifs J.A. Place & L.S. Peterson

Closet Outlaws, David Newman and Robert Benton, an interview

James Childs

Maurice Tourneur, the first of the
visual stylists Richard Koszarski

Mizoguchi Robin Wood

Alain Jessua, transformations of reality Graham Petrie

Film Favorites

bells are ringing Raymond Durgnat

liebelei Andrew Sarris

the i.ooo eyes of dr. mabuse Roger Greenspun

The Fisher Phenominon, the films of
Morgan Fisher Donald Skoller

Critics, Andre Bazin Dudley Andrew

Book Reviews
Letters

vol. 9 no. 3 (May - June 1973)

Journals: Paris, Los Angeles
John Huston: Huston Meets the Eye
Reflections on a Golden Boy
Talking with John Huston, an interview
The Eyehole of Knowledge, voyeuristic games in
film and literature
Jack Lemmon, an interview
To Have (Directed) and Have Not (Written),
reflections on authorship
Tati’s Democracy, Jacques Tati, an interview

Short Subjects
Nora Sayre: A free agent
Nora Sayre: Out of her depth

Elliott Sirkin
Richard Corliss

Richard Roud
Raymond Durgnat
Alfred Appel, Jr.
Jean-Loup Bourget
James McCourt
Martin Rubin

Andrew Sarris
Robin Wood

Tom Reck
Howard Koch
Gene Phillips

Alfred Appel, Jr.
Steven Greenberg

Robin Wood

Tati’s Democracy, Jacques Tati, an interview

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Ken Russell’s Biopics, grander and gaudier Robert Kolker

The English Cine-Structuralists Charle s W. Eckert

_ w __ C/harles W._

Linguistics, Structuralism, Semiology, approachesTo^cfnema,
with a bibliography Charles Harpole and John Hanhardt

Film Favorite Joseph McBride

WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD?

Critics, Raymond Durgnat

Jonathan Rosenbaum and Raymond Durgnat

Book Reviews

vol. 9 no. 4 (July - August 1973)

Journals: Paris, Los Angeles

Stanley Donen, an interview Stephen Harvey

King Vidor, part 1 Raymond Durgnat

__ THE BIG PARADE, THE CROWD, SHOW PEOPLE, HALLELUJAH, STREET
SCENE, THE CHAMP, OUR DAILY BREAD, THE WEDDING NIGHT, THE
CITADEL, NORTHWEST PASSAGE, H. M. PULHAM, ESQ.

Film Favorites

the tall t Robin Wood

three godfathers Joseph McBride -

People we like: Janet Gaynor
O LUCKY MAN

Frederick’s of Hollywood
Romantic Dramas of the Forties
BROKEN GODDESS
Mr. Ford and Mr. Rogers
Letters
Back Page

vol. 10 no. 2 (March - April 1974)

Journals: London, Paris, Teheran
Alfred Hitchcock: Prankster of Paradox
Carl Dreyer

Film as Incantation: An interview with Abel Gance

Steven Kramer & James M. Welch
Mth. Marilyn Monroe Raymond Durgnat

Short Subjects

-People We Like: William K. Everson James Monaco

Update: Sergio Leone Dick Jameson

The Most Erotic Moment in the History of Cinema Robin Wood
Howard Hawks: Masculine Feminine Molly Haskell

Robert Altman Speaking (interview) Jan Dawson

Take Woody Allen—Please! Otis Ferguson

The Griffith Tradition John Dorr

Critics: Harry Alan Potamkin Dudley Andrew

Book Reviews
Theory of Film Practice
Dianying
Letters
Back Page

vol. 10 no. 3 (May - June 1974)

Journals: Boston, Paris

Second Thoughts on Stroheim Jonathan.Rosenbaum

Outlaws, Auteurs, and Actors: thieves like us
Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall

interview by Steven Harvey

text by Richard Corliss

Film Favorite: hoodoo ann Marshall Deutelbaum

The New Yorker Theatre: in memoriam Roger Greenspun

a New Yorker folio by Chandler Brossard, Jules Feiffer,

Andrew Sarris, Roger Greenspun
a hard day’s night: Ten years after Richard Corlis

" Some Late Clues to the Lester Direction James Monaco

Noel Carroll
Bill Nichols

(out of print)

the exorcist— A freak show? Stephen Farber

Part of a phenomenon? Stuart Byron

Short Subjects

People We Like: Robert Walker David Newman

Independents Amos Vogel

Theater Film Life Graham Petrie

Hawks Talks (interview) Joseph McBride and Gerald Peary

Tout Va Bien Steven Simmons

Book Reviews

Stargazer: Andy Warhol Tom Hopkins

The British Film Catalogue, 1895-1970 Marshall Deutelbaum

vol. 10 no. 4 (July - August 1974)

Journals: Paris, Los Angeles
Rossellini

Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman on Rossellini (interview)

Recent Rossellini

House and Garden: Three Films by Renoir
Midsection

Guest Column: Movies and Architecture
People We Like: Artie Steiger
Independents: Animated Films
The Industry: Animal Crackers.

Alfred Hitchcock cameo appearances
Alfred Hitchcock: In Broad Daylight
THE MILKY WAY (Buhuel)

Francis Ford Coppola (interview)

Jack Clayton (interview)

Film Favorite: the incredible shrinking man
Book Reviews

Three Books on Women in Film
Dovzhenko: The Poet as Filmmaker
The Comic Mind
The Editorial Eye: sweet movie

(out of print)

Robin Wood
Robin Wood
John Hughes
Roger Greenspun

Brendan Gill
Charles Silver
Amos Vogel
Wayne Kabak

Richard Roud
Raymond Durgnat
Marjorie Rosen
Marjorie Rosen
Martin Rubin

Janet Sternburg
Stuart Liebman
William Rothman
Richard Corliss

vol. 10 no. 5 (Sept. - Oct. 1974)

Journals: Cannes, Berlin, Zagreb

Robert Altman Michael Dempsey

Jacques Rivette (interview) Jonathan Rosenbaum,

Lauren Sedofsky, Gilbert Adair
The End of the Road: Dark Cinema and Lolita Alfred Appel, Jr.
Midsection

The Industry: “Print the Legend” Stuart Byron

New York Film Festival Preview
the spectre of liberty
Louis Malle and lacombe lucien (interview)

A BIGGER SPLASH
STAVISKY

Independents: The New Documentary
Gene Hackman (interview)

New Directors/New Films

Hal Mohr, cinematographer (interview)

TRISTANA (Buhuel)

Book Review
Cinema in Revolution

Richard Roud
Jan Dawson
David Robinson
Jan Dawson
Amos Vogel
Pete Hamill
Roger Greenspun
Richard Koszarski
Raymond Durgnat

Stuart Liebman

vol. 10 no. 6 (Nov. - Dec. 1974)

Journals: Los Angeles, Paris-London
FILM NOIR

The Family Tree of Film Noir Raymond Durgnat

Violence and the Bitch Goddess (the society) Stephen Farber
Lang’s the woman in the window (the director) Alfred Appel, Jr.
Raymond Chandler: The World You Live In (the writer)

Paul Jensen
Mitchell S. Cohen
Richard T. Jameson

Stephen Harvey
Nat Segaloff
Amos Vogel
Richard Koszarski
William Johnson
Tsimmes at Telluride Peter Nellhaus

The Editorial Eye: After the Deluge Richard Corliss

John Calley, President of Warner Brothers (interview) Stuart Byron
Two Films by Max Ophuls

la signora di tutti Andrew Sarris

letter from an unknown woman Roger Greenspun

Alexander Kluge (interview) Jan Dawson

Book Review ?

Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema Noel Carroll

vol. 11 no. 1 (Jan. - Feb. 1975) (out of print)

Journals: London, Istanbul

Independents: Structures Amos Vogel

Warner Brothers: Focus on a Studio Greg Ford

Villains and Victims (the actor)

Son of Noir

Midsection

People We Like: Setsuko Hara
The Industry: Why a Film Flops
Independents: Parker Tyler
N.Y. Film Festival reviews

Michael Maltese and Maurice Noble (interview) Joe Adamson
Chuck Jones (interview) Greg Ford & Richard Thompson

Duck Amuck: Bugs, Elmer and Daffy Richard Thompson

Winsor McCay John Canemaker

Max and Dave Fleischer Mark Langer

Grim Natwick (interview) John Canemaker

The Van Buren Studio I. Klein

Walt Disney Jonathan Rosenbaum

Tex Avery Jonathan Rosenbaum

Tom and Jerry Mark Kausler

TV Animation Leonard Maltin

Wither the AFI? Austin Lamont

“What Is the BFI?” Verina Glaessner

Book Reviews

Each Man in His Time George Morris

Ozu: His Life and Films Joan Mellen

vol. 11 no. 2 (March - April 1975) (out of print)

Journals: Los Angeles, Knokke

Sternberg’s Empress Robin Wood

Lubitsch’s Widow Nancy Schwartz

John Houseman (interview) Stephen Handzo

Nicholas Ray’s on dangerous ground George Morris

Robert Aldrich’s kiss me deadly Alain Silver

Midsection

Independents: The Personal Documentary Amos Vogel

The Industry: The First Picture Show David Rosenbaum

Movie Costumes Marjorie Rosen

Television: TV Movies Nancy Schwartz

Television: Telefilm U. Richard Corliss

Paul Mazursky: The Horace With a Heart of Gold Richard Corliss
Martin Scorsese (interview) Marjorie Rosen

Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck (interview)

Madeline Warren & Robert Levine
Mel Brooks (interview) Jacoba Atlas

Book Reviews

Visionary Film Wanda Bershen

The Hollywood Professionals, Vol. 3 Robin Wood

Revolutionary Soviet Film Posters Stuart Liebman

Back Page

vol. 11 no. 3 (May - June 1975)

Journals: Rotterdam, East Coast

Stroheim’s walking down Broadway Reconstructed

Richard Koszarski & William K. Everson
Stuart Byron

Robin Wood

Elliott Stein
Amos Vogel
David Rosenbaum
John Hanhardt

Gene D. Phillips
Brendan Gill
Mitchell S. Cohen

Ted Perry
Renee Epstein
Jean-Pierre Coursodon

Don Rugoff: Ballyhoo with a Harvard Education

Art and Ideology: Notes on silk stockings
Midsection

The Art of Art Direction
Independents: Today’s Avant-Garde
The Industry: Prints and Projectionists
Television: Video Artists
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST

John Schlesinger (interview)

A Plague of Locusts
Nathanael West in Hollywood
Dusan Makavejev (interview)Edgardo Cozarinsky & Carlos Clarens
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (Buhuel)

Raymond Durgnat

Back Page

vol. 11 no. 4 (July - August 1975)

the passenger: Men and Landscapes
Antonioni Speaks—and Listens (interview)

Jerry Lewis’s Films: No Laughing Matter?

Film Maudit Dossier
Marcel Ophuls’ the memory of justice

Jay Cocks, David Denby, Barbara Epstein,
Lillian Heilman, Mike Nichols, Frank Rich,
John Simon, Susan Sontag, Telford Taylor
The Silencing of Serge Paradjanov Antonin Liehm

Film Censorship in Yugoslavia Dusan Makavejev

Populism and Social Realism Raymond Durgnat

Midsection

The Industry: Actors’ Salaries
Television: Vietnam on TV
Guest Column: promised lands
Independents: Film Structures
Alain Resnais (two interviews)

In Defense of Art

George Stevens: Three Wartime Comedies
George Mansour, Jr., Film Booker (interview)

Back Page

vol. 11 no. 5 (Sept. - Oct. 1975)

Journals: Los Angeles, London, Cannes, Annecy

Samurai Alain Silver

Kon Ichikawa and the wanderers William Johnson

Paul Sarlat
Lawrence W. Lichty
James McCourt
Amos Vogel
James Monaco, Richard Seaver
Robin Wood
Bruce Petri
Janet Maslin

(out of print)

Hitchcock’s family plot Andrew Meyer

Sydney Pollack (interview) Patricia Erens

Against Conclusions Robin Wood

Midsection

Split-Screen Bicentennial Stuart Byron

Film Square Vs. Movie Hip Stuart Byron

Television: TVTV Renee Epstein

New York Film Festival Preview
exhibition Richard Corliss

the story of adele h. Richard Roud

grey gardens Charles Michener

Independents: Structuralist Literature Amos Vogel

John Ford: Midway (war documentaries) Tag Gallagher

The Working Class Goes to Hollywood Tom S. Reck

Miklos Jansco’s electra Graham Petrie

Frank’s Films (Frank Mouris) Michael Kerbel

Book Reviews

Sexual Alienation in the Cinema Greg Palokane

Five Film Bibliographies Richard Koszarski

Kuleshov on Film Stuart Liebman

Back Page

vol. 11 no. 6 (Nov. - Dec. 1975) (out of print)

Journal: Telluride

Reflections in a Broken Glass The Editors

R.W. Fassbinder Manny Farber & Patricia Patterson

fist-right of freedom Roger Greenspun

Why Herr R. Ran Amok John Hughes

Fassbinder interview John Hughes & Brooks Riley

Douglas Sirk: Melo Maestro James McCourt

Fassbinder on Sirk R.W. Fassbinder

New Cinema at Edinburgh Robin Wood

Midsection

The Industry: Four-Walling Wayne Kabak

N.Y. Film Festival: Breaking Rules at
the Roulette Table Manny Farber & Patricia Patterson

N.Y. Film Festival: Kitsch ’n Synch Elliott Stein

Television: Media Kidnappings Richard Corliss

Independents: Ethnographic Films Amos Vogel

Ken Russell Stephen Farber

New Cinema from Eastern Europe Graham Petrie

Marguerite Duras on India song (interview) Jan Dawson

Book Review

The Pyramid Movie Series Gerald Weales

Book Marks Richard T. Jameson

Back Page

vol. 12 no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1976)

Journal: London

Leo McCarey and the Hollywood Tradition

McCarey’s my son John

John Huston interview

Huston’s the man who would be king

C.B. De Mille: For God, Country & Whoopee

Midsection

Guest Column: The Video Connection
Television: British TV’s Donald Churchill
Retrospective: Forties War Movies
The Industry: Movie Star Malaise
Independents: Unhappy Trends
Walerian Borowczyk’s Cartoons
Borowczyk interview
Yiddish-American Films

(out of print)

James Frawley interview
Book Review
Jacques Tourneur

Robin Wood
George Morris
Gideon Bachmann
Brendan Gill
Ruth Perlmutter

Gerald Weales
Charles Barr
Mary McCarthy
Stephen Farber
Amos Vogel
Raymond Durgnat
Carlos Clarens
Patricia Erens
Tom Milne & Richard Combs

Robin Wood

vol. 12 no. 2 (March-April 1976)

Journal: Teheran
taxi driver

Paul Schrader interview
Film Acting

The Pluck of barry lyndon
Midsection

Independents: Happy Trends
The Industry: ’75’s Boffo Flicks
Gala Preview: that’s entertainment, part 2
Television l: TV’s Sports Auteurs Bruce Berman

Television II: Wrestling on TV John Margolies

Pasolini and salo Gideon Bachmann

Lina Wertmuller: Pro Diane Jacobs

Lina Wertmuller: Con Brooks Riley

Manhattan in the Movies James McCourt

shadow of a doubt Ronnie Scheib

(out of print)

Charles Michener
Richard Thompson
Robin Wood
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Amos Vogel
Stuart Byron

vol. 12 no. 3 (May-June 1976)

Journal: Los Angeles

F.W. Murnau: nosferatu and sunrise Robin Wood

Hitchcock’s family plot Roger Greenspun

Two Versions of gaslight Andrew Sarris

taxi driver Manny Farber & Patricia Patterson

Midsection

Independents: Film Programmers Poll Amos Vogel

In Memoriam: Luchino Visconti
In Memoriam: Howard Hughes
The Industry: snuff
Television: Dick Cavett
Road Runner & Coyote
Diary of a Mad Cel-Washer
face to face: I

FACE TO FACE: II
James M. Cain interview
Book Review

Four Books on Jean Renoir

James McCourt
Andrew Sarris
Peter Birge & Janet Maslin
Brooks Riley
Richard Thompson
Chuck Jones
Charles Michener
Samson Raphaelson
Peter Brunette & Gerald Peary

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Brendan Gill
Andrew Sarris
Richard Thompson
Tag Gallagher
Mitch Tuchman

vol. 12 no. 4 (July-August 1976)

Journals: London-N.Y., Australia
Guest Column: Supreme Court Porno
Billy Wilder in the Forties
John Milius interview
Three Versions of the blue bird
Pat O’Neill in All Directions
Midsection

The Industry: Ken Kesey’s Martyr Complex Stuart Byron

Television: CBS on PBS Robert Sklar

Retrospective: Meeting the Public Demands Maurice Tourneur
Retrospective: Rubber Stamp Movies King Vidor

Film Noir, Life Noir Peter Hankoff

Independents: Reader’s Digest Avant Garde I Amos Vogel

Arthur Penn interview Terry Curtis Fox & Stuart Byron

the Missouri breaks Charles Michener

Film Apres Noir Larry Gross

Britannia Waives the Rules Raymond Durgnat

Book Marks: Encyclopedias Richard T. Jameson

Book Review

Movie-Made America & America at the Movies Gerald Weales

Richard T. Jameson
Richard Thompson
Patrick McGilligan
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jan Dawson

Amos Vogel

vol. 12 no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1976)

Journals: Cannes, Berlin, Brasilia
The Pakula Parallax
Alan J. Pakula interview
Banking on the Movies (interview)

Rivette’s duelle
Eduardo de Gregorio interview
Midsection *

Independents: Reader’s Digest Avant Garde II
New York Film Festival Preview

the marquise of o... Charles Michener

in the realm of the senses Tony Rayns

Television: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Roger Ebert

The Industry: Textbook Terminology Stuart Byron

Francois Truffaut interview Joseph McBride & Todd McCarthy

Ford’s the grapes of wrath Janey Place

Satyajit Ray interview John Hughes

Bernard Herrmann’s Film Music John Broeck

Book Reviews

The New Wave Roger Copeland

The Cubist Cinema Stuart Liebman

vol. 12 no. 6 (Nov.-Dee. 1976)

Journals: Los Angeles, Venice, Telluride

Louis Feuillade: Maker of Melodrama Richard Roud

Francis Ford: Brother Feeney Tag Gallagher

Vincente & Liza Minnelli interview Gideon Bachmann

Minnelli’s a matter of time George Morris

Structuralism or Humanism? Robin Wood

Hal Ashby’s bound for glory Joseph McBride

Midsection

Independents: Reader’s Digest Avant Garde III Amos Vogel
Television: Police Stories Tom Ryan

The Industry: Jeff Berg, Movie Agent Richard Thompson

N.Y. Film Festival: Festivalog James McCourt

N.Y. Film Festival: Hit-and-Myth Elliott Stein

Chabrol’s la femme infidele and le boucher Peter Harcourt
Stephanie Rothman: Fully Female Terry Curtis Fox

British Film Critics Poll Jonathan Rosenbaum

Book Reviews

Three Books on John Ford Roger Greenspun

The Oxford Companion to Film Robin Wood